


Next Season

by gondalsqueen



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Advice, Alderaan, Babies!, Battle for Coruscant, Battle of Endor, Battle of Scarif, Bounty Hunters, Breakups, Capture, Chair Sex, Childbirth, Counseling, Death Star, Dogfight - Freeform, Dreams, Established Relationship, Existential Anxiety, F/F, F/M, Grief, Hoth, Inappropriate bets, Jedi Night, Lothal, Lothwolves, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Masturbation, Morning Sickness, One baby, Oral Sex, Pregnancy, Quests, Return of the Jedi, Rogue One - Freeform, Season/Series 04, Second Death Star, Secrets, Shopping, Space Combat, Space family, Stardust - Freeform, Table Sex, The New Republic - Freeform, Traditions, Travel, Work/Life Balance, Yavin 4, ask me no questions i'll tell you no lies, but one of these days you'll get a surprise, canon torture, chapter 2 has lots of sex, character injury, did i mention babies yet?, domestic life, down time, flight of the defender, flying combat, forces of destiny: an imperial feast, future character death in the background, hammerhead corvette!, labor, letting go, parenting, rebel assault, sex during pregnancy, the best pilot in the galaxy, this story has it all apparently, vague mentions of abortion, wine and cheesecake, wine and cheesecake needs its own tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-03-28 08:45:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 18
Words: 39,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13900452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen
Summary: "'I’m pregnant,' she said without thinking.The next time she said it out loud, Kanan would be dead, Ezra gone, Lothal won, and the pattern of her entire adult life smashed around her. Today was different, though."Want to know how Hera deals with Kanan's death and a new baby? Me too.





	1. Crazy, Impossible

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently I'm diving deep into the rabbit hole of the whole baby train thing like the fangirl that I am, because I will do anything for Hera Syndulla. 
> 
> Right now, this story is about pregnancy. Eventually it will also be about grieving. Expect the rest of the crew to show up soon. Also keep your eyes out for a rating change soon, because if we're going to have trauma we should at least get sex, too.

It wasn’t like she’d had no time to prepare. When the contraceptive strip on her arm went, just disappeared overnight without a trace, her heart had dropped into her stomach. But things like this had happened before (not like this, she’d fretted, not textbook early warning), and it was probably just some weird fluctuation of hormones. The next day she had kind of a rough landing so she got hauled to the med center, standard procedure even though nothing was wrong with her.

“I made it to the ground,” she told 2-1D, their usual conversation at times like these. “I’m fine.”

He paused, the droid equivalent of fond exasperation. “You got shot down. If you don’t want to be here, stop doing that.”

At least his examinations were quick and efficient. “You’re fine,” he confirmed five minutes later.

“I told you that.”

“Yes, well, you are a medical expert. Expect harness bruises in the next day or two. You might want to get them tattooed on your shoulders and make them permanent since you seem to like them so much. Save us the bacta.”

“You’re a real friend.”  

“See you soon, Captain.”

Hera hadn’t decided what to say next, so she just sat there stupidly.

“Something else?”

“As long as I’m here, could you check my, ah, hormone levels? I think they’ve been a little—” she cleared her throat— “off.”

2-1D gave her a long level look with those reflective eyes. “Hmm.” Out came the scanner again and then he told her flatly, “You’re pregnant.”

“Oh.” Something sharp broke open in her chest, some feeling...she didn’t know what. She spoke around a tight throat. “I’m. Are you sure it’s that? Not something else?”

“I am a fully programmed medical droid with seventeen areas of expertise. The test is not difficult to perform.” She waited until he filled in the blanks for her. “Quite certain.”

“I thought it wasn’t possible…”

“For you and Commander Jarrus to procreate? Medically improbable.”

“Well. That’s… Thanks for giving it to me straight, Onedee.” Shock. It was shock.

“Always a pleasure, Captain Syndulla. If you decide to schedule a procedure, feel free to come to me rather than the triage droid.”

Hera nodded absently. “I need to think.”

“Of course.”

Then she sat there, thinking.

“Captain Syndulla, contact Commander Jarrus,” 2-1D suggested.

“No, I… He’ll be back from Mandalore soon. I need to think first.” She couldn’t deal with his reaction until she’d gotten a grip on her own. “Thank you, Onedee. This is private medical information, I’m sure?”

“Of course. All part of the programming.”

“Thank you.”

She wandered out on autopilot, not realizing where she was going until she found herself squinting in the sun on the landing strip.

It wasn’t new, this idea that she might be pregnant. If you stay with anyone for ten years, you’re going to have scares. The new part was her...lack of resolve. She’d thought they’d decided this already. No bringing children into a war, at least not one as hot as this was getting. But now… She didn’t want to tell Kanan and she didn’t want to schedule a procedure, as Onedee so delicately put it. She needed to process this reality for a while first, figure out what it might mean for them. Stop lying to herself.

Because that first feeling in her chest—it hadn’t been shock. It had been crazy, impossible joy. She hadn’t seen that coming.

Chopper found her and asked about the medical exam with his characteristic backhanded concern. CaptainHeraSyndulla << brain cells re: most recent crash??

“I’m pregnant,” she said without thinking.

The next time she said it out loud, Kanan would be dead, Ezra gone, Lothal won, and the pattern of her entire adult life smashed around her. Today was different, though. Right now hope was a wild thing taking off and she could hear the wings beating in her own body.

CaptainHeraSyndulla == feet on ground, Chopper scolded. Beating == heart.

Hera laughed shakily. “Only that, huh?”


	2. Satisfied

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We could really use the rest." Kanan caught her hand and a thrill went through her. It had been a while, and last time...well...she knew what had happened last time.
> 
> "Oh, I don’t know," she teased. "You’re not up for something a little more active?"
> 
> The wind rustled past them, blowing loose strands of hair all around his head then whipping them back against his cheek. There was no other sound and no one around for kilometers. That goofy smile spread across his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note the ratings change--this chapter is very dirty and very happy. Place it just before "Flight of the Defender."
> 
> Thanks to the most excellent [ ShannonPhillips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShannonPhillips/pseuds/ShannonPhillips) for letting me borrow her headcanon about tchilla.
> 
> Chapter inspired by [gmodart's incredibly lovely Kanan and Hera art](http://gmodart.tumblr.com/post/171567651510/wow-okay-star-wars-rebels-is-ending-today-and-im).

Hera watched Sabine, Zeb, Ezra, and Ryder through the macrobinoculars until they crossed the horizon line, even when Kanan walked up behind her and waited pointedly for her to notice him.

“They’re not turning around, right?” he asked.

“Nope. They’re gone.”

“You don’t feel even a little bit bad for sending them all on a reconnaissance mission to get them out of the...uhm...house?”

“Kanan, we need intel on that Defender now.”

“But Hera...You did send _all_ of them so they’d be out of the way, right?”

She grinned her private I’m-not-telling grin, which would have been a lot more fun if he could actually see it. He seemed to get the idea, though, his lips twitching in a conspiratorial smile. “Chopper’s recharging his fuel cells,” she said. “He could really use the rest.”

“We could really use the rest.” Kanan caught her hand and a thrill went through her. It had been a while, and last time...well...she knew what had happened last time.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she teased. “You’re not up for something a little more active?”

The wind rustled past them, blowing loose strands of hair all around his head then whipping them back against his cheek. There was no other sound and no one around for kilometers. That goofy smile spread across his face.

Yes, then. They said it without saying it—yes. She lifted the mask from his eyes carefully but dropped it, laughing, when he picked her up and swung around to deposit her against the wall of the tower, safely away from the railing. His hands on her sides felt like sex already. She was so filled with adrenaline all the time these days, half of her terrified that he’d know and the other half barely able to keep it in, charged like a grenade. No wonder when he touched her she lit up.

Maybe she’d tell him today. Maybe he’d do some Jedi thing and figure it out.

Then his mouth was on hers and they were kissing rough against the wall, Hera dragging him down with hands at his neck, his beard scratching her face. They didn’t break off until both were out of breath, then they touched foreheads together, her arms around his shoulders, leaning against him on tip-toe. 

“We should slow down,” Kanan suggested. “We’ve got too much time to—”

“—fuck against the wall,” Hera cut him off, letting her voice drop into that husky register. His cock jumped obligingly against her hip. “Yeah. I agree.”

“You are going to be the death of me,” Kanan laughed, but he kissed the top of her head. The message was clear: We’ll slow it down, then.

So she picked up the mask. Then she took his hand and led him through the door, into the tower, dropping his mask by the rest of his travel gear as she went. It was good, so good, to relax.

“Leave the comms on in case they need us,” he said.

“Obviously.”

“One way only.”

“Kanan, that was one time, and it was five years ago!”

He grinned without apology, so she pushed him lightly into the big cushioned chair against the wall. “Ezra can never know about this,” she declared. “He’d burn this chair.”

“I promise not to tell if you promise not to stop.”

“Deal.” She stripped down to tank top and pants with practiced speed. Once she would have taken some time with it, arched, stretched her arms over her head when the shirt came off, but he couldn’t see it anyway, and she wasn’t _that_ patient. There he sat, loose-collared with his face open to her, smiling and waiting to see what would happen next. He was so pretty.

So she slid onto his lap and straddled him, and Kanan gripped her thighs reflexively. Desire curled low in her abdomen, willing to take its time. “Take your shirt off,” she told him, but he said “wait,” and then his hands framed her face. “Just a minute,” and then he slipped the earphones and goggles from her head instead.

That was better, but he was still wearing too many clothes. Hera ended up pulling the shirt over his head herself, and then all that skin was hers. She could run her hands up the taut muscles of his stomach, then chest, then neck, spearing them into his hair at the nape. She leaned in to tease his ear but got distracted by the arch of his neck, instead. The familiar smell of him against her mouth—easy warmth and soap and something that made her feel dizzy and good at the same time.

Oops. That was definitely going to leave a mark.

“Hera,” he groaned. She sat up to look at him. “Hey,” he said softly, his own hands at her neck. His fingers slipped under the edge of her cap and teased behind her ear, coming just short of a lek. “Hi, pretty lady.” A shiver in her scalp and a pang lower—she leaned her head back and moaned.

Then his lips moved slow on her throat and his hands wandered, and she arched to let him have free range. Thighs, ass, back, _lekku_...yes, getting warmer. She squirmed against his lap in approval. Her cap went with one tug and what sounded suspiciously like a ripped seam. Now he could cup the base of her lek, pulling her in towards him so that he could tease there with lips and fingers in that frustrating way that had her panting in no time. “Kanan...nmm…” 

He just laughed at her.

“Kanan—” If he kept this up she was going to come, begging and working much harder than she wanted to for it. “Stop.” She pushed, fingertips on his shoulder, and he settled back into the chair.

“You all right?”

“Very all right. Too all right.” She ground her hips experimentally against his. Oh, yeah. He definitely had some skin in the game. So she started an easy rhythm, hips rolling against his cock, and Kanan practically growled his appreciation.

His hands dropped to her breasts, over the thin material of her tank top, skating the sides with his fingers and then squeezing, and Hera realized that it actually ached a little at the same time she realized that she was now thoroughly wet between the legs. His touch felt like fire, like connection. Was this how he sensed her through the Force? Probably not since the end result was that she wanted to climb him.

“These are amazing,” Kanan groaned. Then he lowered his face to her cleavage and she almost lost her mind.

She ground down hard. “Kanan, don’t—”

He paused. 

“Don’t stop.”

Well, there went her shirt. Aaaaand his mouth was on her breast. And his erection pressing firmly between her legs. Stars, she wanted him, it would just take a moment. She fumbled with the clasp at the front of his pants, slipped in an expert hand, and had him free to stroke in no time.

“Her—aa!” as she tightened her grip on him.

Now what was he doing? Picking her up, taking two steps. Oh. Laying her back on the table. Stripping off her pants and underthings—she raised her hips to help him and he took the boots too, all tossed aside in a jumble. And then he knelt in front of her and it was all she could do to keep it together, splayed out for him like that. 

“Can I?” he asked wistfully. His thumbs traced tiny circles at the apex of her thighs.

“Yes. Yes.”

He leaned in and kissed, then drug his tongue from bottom to top in one slow swipe. 

“Yes!”

She had to give it to him, he certainly knew what he was doing. His fingers grazed lightly over the sensitive tchilla protecting even more sensitive parts, and oh, and oh. Her legs shook and she nearly cried it was so good.

“Hey.” A kiss to her thigh. “Tell me if it’s too much.”

“Not too much.”

She could _feel_ his smile against her leg. “Well, not yet.”

“Kanan Jarrus, you have a lot of—”

He pulled her folds gently apart and licked her with the rough of his tongue, and she lost the ability to speak.

From there he didn’t mess around. Ten years in, he knew her rhythm, and his tongue between her legs was firm, slow, and right on her clitoris. She started to shake again. He stayed with her, those steady strokes like waves rolling over her, not teasing and not too merciless. “Good,” she breathed. If he just kept it up she was going to come...now...please...

“I’ve got you,” he soothed. Then he drug his tongue over her clit and she broke with a little, incoherent cry at the ceiling, and when she looked down he was still there, grinning up at her like a smug fool.

“You—” she let out a held breath, almost laughing. “That was fantastic.” Her nerves had calmed a bit, but that orgasm had only taken the edge off. She still felt achingly empty inside, and Kanan… Well, she couldn’t see over the table’s edge but it was a safe bet he had his fist around his cock. She wanted in on that action. He moved enough to kiss her hip, no doubt wiping his face on her, and that was sexy, too.

“Don’t go,” she told him. “I want you inside me.”

He nodded once, tense, and started to stand.

“In the chair.”

Oh, Kanan. He took a deep, controlled breath, and she thought he might be drawing on those meditation techniques to keep it together. Then he kissed her belly one more time and helped her up, this time guiding her back to the big chair. A knee on one side of him, a knee on the other, sliding into place and then sliding down onto him and they met for the—What? The ten thousandth time? The empty ache became a flood of delight.  

If she rose on her knees, she could feel him dragging against her on the way out, making her squeeze suddenly empty muscles. If she sank down, he pushed into her sweetly, inch by inch.   

She was moving too slowly to satisfy him. Before that changed, though, she reached down to where their bodies met and explored the base of his cock with her fingers. Up—there he was slick with the remainder of her orgasm. Down—her own body spread impossibly around him, his cock thick when she clenched those muscles. He was inside her. His baby was inside her, waiting safely for them to notice, and she could remember him climaxing last time, she’d been flat on her back, she knew when it had to have happened… 

She very nearly came on him right then, but that didn’t seem fair. Instead, when he said, “Hera. Hera, love—” in that tight voice that so clearly meant please, she rose on her knees and fucked him steadily, picking up the pace as his tight breaths turned into tight, quick thrusts. He was close, so close, throbbing inside her like he did when he was just about to burst, so she leaned in and drew his ear between her teeth…

...and he came with a groan of relief and profound gratitude, meeting her thrust for thrust until his body finally relaxed. Hera closed her eyes and rode him, concentrating on that feeling and keeping his pace. They slowed to a stop.

“Are you good?” he asked.

“Wait—” She was close. Her muscles tightened around him and she called those earlier thoughts back to mind.  He had come inside her. He was filling her, had already filled her. She pushed down again. And his baby grew inside her, a heavy, imaginary weight.

She clenched around him and came hard.

When she opened her eyes, he was watching her. Not literally of course, but considering her carefully all the same. 

She should tell him now. It was the perfect time. But she was half afraid he would start in on the “when are you going to back off the Rebellion and prioritize us” talk again, and anyway she couldn’t think of what to say under that scrutiny. Instead she leaned in and hugged him, his chest sweaty against her face.

Kanan wrapped his arm around her. “What?” he asked.

“I was about to ask you that. What was that look for?”

“Hera, you’re brooding on something.”

“That’s usually my line to you.”

“What is it?”

She opened her mouth and no words came out. She tried to push them out of her throat, but it didn’t work. “Nothing,” she settled, trying not to wince at her own cowardice.

“Uh huh. You never say ‘nothing’ unless it’s something big.”

“Kanan, everything’s fine.”

“Hera—” he kissed the top of her head. “You keep secrets when something scares you and you don’t know how to deal with it. We talked about this. Let me help.”

She sighed deeply. “I can’t right now. I...don’t know how to. I’ll tell you soon. Promise.” 

He crashed out on the couch soon afterwards and Hera watched him sleep, open-mouthed and relaxed. She leaned in to kiss him on the cheek and he didn’t even stir.

“Kanan,” she said quietly.

Nothing. Not a hitch in his breathing.

So she tried it out, leaning in close and whispering it into his hair. “We’re going to have a baby.”


	3. Mad Mission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "No, no, no, no, he wasn’t dead yet, this hadn’t happened yet, it didn’t have to happen. Gods damn Kanan, he held her there completely helpless while he said goodbye."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one starts out triumphant, and so much of it is Hera kicking butt, but it ends...really rough. This is the nadir, guys. No other chapter will hurt as much as this one. 
> 
> Chapter title from Patty Griffin's "Mad Mission."

From the moment she said “May the Force be with you,” she knew what her role would be. Junk ship, impossible odds, Chopper at her back.  _ This is a real Hera Syndulla situation, _ her friends would be saying on the ground, rolling their eyes. Everything that made her Hera woke up and rose to the occasion. Watch this, Thrawn. Watch what I can do. 

When she burst through the half-constructed dome, slamming into hyperspeed because Chopper’s calculations were PERFECT and Sabine’s patch job had WORKED, she yelled in triumph, then knocked poor Chop over with the hug. He continued to sing his own praises from the ground.

“Yeah,” she said. “We did it. I’m not ready to stop. Are you?”

And then, after they’d practically bent reality to escape, the council dragged its feet.  _ Well, I don’t know if we can afford to commit… You see, there are so many other priorities… _ Hera had played enough holovid games as a child to know you don’t pick and choose which threats to neutralize. She wasn’t about to be benched because they didn’t realize the scope of the problem. 

We have momentum, she thought. If we don’t win now, we die later. Let’s not hand them the galaxy on a platter.

So she convinced them. And they gave her a promotion in lieu of real support. 

Well, that wasn’t quite fair. They’d committed two squadrons. Twelve fighters and twelve bombers to defeat an entire army deployed in a planet-wide blockade. Go ahead, General. See what you can do.

She thought back for the hundredth time to a conversation with her aunt, just before she’d left Ryloth. “You are a Twi’lek and a woman,” Aunt Treya had said. “People are going to put you in impossible situations just to watch you fail. That will confirm their beliefs about you.”

And because she was leaving, Hera had taken the time to listen. “So...what do I do?”

Her aunt had blinked at her as if she were stupid. “You win.”

Just do the impossible. No big deal. Well, she’d seen Kanan leap into the air and fly simply by trusting that he could do it. And she had trained these kids who were now bouncing impatiently, waiting for their ships to finish fueling. They were quick and bold as lightning.

Chopper blatted excitedly behind her. X-wing, X-wing! Okay, they  _ had _ given her the good fighters, at least. She had some ideas about tricks to try with those S-foils. “Want to play?” she asked him.  

He was the only person in the galaxy who would chortle with glee at that suggestion. 

When her X-wing hummed with the building power of takeoff, she gave her pep talk to the team. “I’ve never seen a group of pilots like you. Get in there full speed, don’t stop moving, and HAVE FUN. You do that and they’ll never touch you.”

Mart commed in. “We’re with you all the way, General.” 

Then they jumped.

She closed her eyes and imagined her childhood as they traveled. Swinging through trees and cartwheeling across the ground, playing fighter pilot and winning every time. Pew, pew, pew! If you didn’t hold still, they couldn’t get a shot at you. When the alarm pinged the five-minute warning for their arrival, she opened her eyes. Time to take care of business. She put her hand on her abdomen for the briefest of moments and felt, of course, nothing. Okay, kid, she thought. This is going to get rough. Again. You’re going to have to take your chances like the rest of us.

Then she thought of each member of her squadron, also her kids. She’d trained them, they were all depending upon each other, and she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that they wouldn’t falter. And they were about to die. Some of them, anyway, and she’d have to keep flying without even a pause to blink, just tuck their memories away and mourn them later. She’d done it before.

The hyperdrive monitor beeped more urgently, building to that moment they jumped back into real space. It was time. “All right, let’s make this count. Lothal is depending upon us. Remember, the Imperial fuel depot is our primary target.”

And then she fought.

And she kriffing won.

Except the Empire had too many ships. It wasn’t fair; no matter what she threw at them, they had more. She thought she’d beaten the game when they entered atmosphere, but she had only beaten the first level. Well. She had a choice about which ships to get to the ground, and the bombers were by far more valuable. When their army of TIEs spread out in front of her, she braked hard and turned her belly to them. Get the other ships behind her. They could still man a bombing run.

But they couldn’t, and a dozen fighters strafed her X-wing with cannon fire. And then they shot her squadron anyway.

Behind her, Jon yelled in alarm. Zriba said, “General, it’s been an honor.” 

“No!” she told them. “Remember what we practiced. Aim for the city. All you need is your cockpit and enough of your wings to make it to the ground.” The Empire hadn’t blown her to bits yet, and it wasn’t over. She knew how to land using only the wind. 

The ground was coming up fast, coming up fast, avoid the houses. Raise the nose. Airbrake.

She blacked out. 

 

…

 

If Chopper hadn’t opened the cockpit dome she’d be dead, suffocated on the smoke from her own burning control panels. As it was, she didn’t feel great. Head. Right arm, her dominant arm. She could travel with an injury to the arm, might even be able to fire a blaster with it. But the obvious concussion… that was going to be a problem. 

Then they got moving, Chopper prodding her in the back of the thigh with an electric shock, and that brought her around nicely. When she found Mart, she realized that she could gather her forces and keep fighting.

And then Rukh arrived.

He moved faster than she could track, but his style was textbook. Leftshoulder rightshoulder leftknee rightknee. She went into autopilot, her body recalling the decade of training sessions with Kanan. Block, block, punch. A twist, and he took her to the ground. Ouch. Block, block, retreat.

Thighs around his head. “Your strongest muscles,” Kanan had told her. This time  _ she _ dropped  _ him _ . She suspected Rukh was the better fighter but had been given orders to bring her in unharmed. Well, largely unharmed. Her body kicked in where her brain failed. Fight, fight, run.

Kanan was out there, Kanan and Ezra and Sabine and Zeb, and if she moved fast enough and hit hard enough she could get to them. Find something big and ram it into anything between you and them, just hit over and over until any resistance gives. A speeder, huh? That would do nicely.

And when it came to that moment, that final moment when Imperial tanks stacked up against her, she still managed to get Mart and Chopper away. Hera Syndulla, 2. Empire, 1. She called that a victory right up until Governor Pryce shot her.

 

…

 

She came to flat on her back in an Imperial interrogation chair with her arms strapped down, her eye swollen shut, a few teeth loose, and bruises up her arms and legs, and they were...treating her. Thrawn peered down with that detached interest, as if she were some new species of beetle for him to dissect and study. “She won’t give you good information if she cannot remain conscious,” he was explaining to Governor Pryce. He turned to the medical droid. “Treat all of her injuries.” A contemptuous sniff. “Then you can have her, Governor.” 

Hera realized that she should be faking unconsciousness a moment after he noticed her. “Ah, Captain Syndulla. Awake, I see. Never fear, 2-2G will heal you in short order. Then we will talk again.” A chirrup of his comm. He glanced at it, then turned to Pryce. “Try not to bungle the interrogation.” Then he left. Good. That would give her a chance.  

Pryce sneered in disgust. “Call me when she is...cleaned up.”

Hera closed her eyes as the droid injected her with something and the pain blissfully faded.  

 

…

 

The first shock was bad, but all the others were worse. No matter how she tried to anticipate them, each one sent a jolt of surprise and panic down her spine. That was worse than the pain — that feeling of terror squeezing her heart. It was really just electricity, but it felt like fear. 

Pryce hadn’t even asked her any questions.

She could hold on. She  _ could _ . It hurt like fire, but the pain came over her in waves and then stopped for long enough that she could catch her breath and center herself again. And Kanan was coming for her. She didn’t know how he’d do it, but as sure as she felt her own heart beating, she knew it. She was still alive. And he was on his way.

Pryce pushed the button again and the voltage ripped through her, catching her off guard. Come on, Kanan, hurry.

 

…

 

She couldn’t remember all of it, that was the worst part. Her last moments with him and they’d drugged her with something that made her sloppy and her memory patchy. The Empire had taken even her memory. 

She remembered the needle coming at her and thinking, no, no I don’t know what’s in that, I don’t know what it’s going to do to me. And then relaxing, though she tried to fight against it. She was supposed to hold something back. What was it? Every object in the room was surrounded by a halo of light, even Governor Pryce, and Hera tried to tell her why it was funny, but she wasn’t sure whether she’d spoken or not. We’re all bound together, connected by the Force, Kanan had said. Hera could see it now, a great benevolent thing that made her want to share all that she had.

Her friends. Pryce was asking something. “Where are the Rebels?” She had to get back to her friends. 

And then Kanan was there, he had come to her. He shone with that light that made everything splendid and then came abruptly into focus. Climbing. What had he done to his face? 

“I have to tell you something,” she told her guards, who probably weren’t such bad guys after all. “You’re in terrible trouble.” 

And then he was there, leaping up through the floor. The second stormtrooper flew through the window with a dramatic shattering of plexiglass. Where had the first gone? He was using his lightsaber, and he moved his shoulder in that instinctive rotation that even now tugged at something in the pit of her stomach. Her beautiful boy. 

What had he done to his hair? 

Her hands came abruptly free, then the room went a little sideways. Kanan set her on her feet and she started to feel better. She said some stupid things — “Kanan, you haven’t gotten me a present since we first met” — only to remember abruptly that this was untrue. She really needed to tell him soon.   

The gliders she remembered, that glorious rush of wind with no noise of an engine. These things had Sabine spray painted all over them. Kanan teasing her about crashing. And then up the fuel pod to the top, side by side, just like the old days.

They were going to make it. She was supposed to tell him something. The light around the edges had faded, but if she tried, she could just remember…

Him. Her. Everything else in the galaxy of course, but the two of them at the center of it running and fighting next to each other and with space enough for what they needed. “I love you,” she said, and then his lips were on her lips and his face against her face. The kids showed up with their ride. Her hand was in Kanan’s.

And then the fuel pod exploded. The edges of the world lit up again, only this time it was fire.

Hera rushed towards Kanan, her head abruptly, completely clear. He’d hold off the blast, she could get him out of there. They could do this. Then his hand flew out at her and she stopped in place, paralyzed, hovering right in the air as he held the blast off with a single hand.

...And he looked at her. He looked right at her.

He was saying goodbye.

No, no, no, no, he wasn’t dead yet, this hadn’t happened yet, it didn’t have to happen. Gods damn Kanan, he held her there completely helpless while he said goodbye.

He had known this.

The heat intensified. The bubble he’d created in front of them wouldn’t last much longer. She watched him without blinking, Kanan with the scar across his nose and the stupid haircut, and then his eyes unclouded, clear and glass green as ever, and his gaze focused and they caught each other’s souls.

She flew backwards and hit Ezra hard a moment before the blast and she didn’t see him go. The light from the explosion was everywhere and her ears were ringing and somehow Sabine had managed to fly them away, up higher and higher. She was coming unmoored, floating up into the sky. 

The noise of the blast died off and Hera realized she was screaming. Maybe it was “no,” maybe it was just some incoherent vowel sound, but it went on and on, ripped raw out of her body, and after she stopped to take a breath it just started again. Ezra held her tightly, sobbing as if he were retching, his body convulsing. He was probably keeping them in place with a Force grip; neither one of them had bothered to hang on to anything. 

Hera went hoarse then finally collapsed on the deck in a coughing fit, and that made her stop screaming. Go back for him, she almost said. The urge was so strong she could barely hold it in. Go back and get him right now before it’s too late, turn around, save him. But if they went back what would they do? It was already too late. Fight, Hera, fight, she told herself. There has to be SOMETHING…

She hit the deck with an angry fist. It hurt. Again. She had to do something. Again, and again, until Sabine yelled, “Stop it!” Then she collapsed flat on her stomach against the deck and sobbed the little bit that her body would allow. Ezra had curled up in the corner, moaning quietly to himself, mumbling “Please, Kanan, please.” Sabine flew steadily, only an occasional strangled hiccough from the cockpit. How was she doing it? The deck vibrated beneath Hera’s hips and cheek, a solid surface to moor her against that floating feeling. 

She had sounded like she was dying, she realized. She’d never heard anybody scream like that and Ezra and Sabine had suffered the same loss and she’d made them listen to her scream. Stop it, Hera. 

“Sabine,” she said, then coughed. Her voice was mostly gone. “You did great. Thank you. You did great.” Sabine didn’t answer, just a small, strangled moan that meant she was angry crying up there. Hera pulled herself up and crawled over to Ezra, every movement struggling against a great weight. The planet’s gravity had grown unbearable. When she got there, she could only lean her forehead against his leg, and he didn’t manage to move at all, but at least he knew she was here. “Good kids,” she said roughly. 

She was going to die, everything inside her hurt like death. They broke me, she thought. I wondered what it would be like to be tortured until I broke, and this is it.

“Pull them together,” she imagined Kanan saying. “We depend on you.” But she just laid there and waited for death to swoop down for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to talk a little bit about Hera's grief here, because I debated with myself a lot. I know she's strong, and I know she's ultimately going to be okay. I don't think any of us doubts that. But what she has lost here... other than maybe losing Chopper, nothing worse in the world could happen to her than losing Kanan. It re-writes every single thing about the life she's had since she was eighteen years old. He's entwined into everything, and to lose that... it's like being ripped in half and not getting the luxury of dying. I worried that the ending here is too melodramatic, too extreme for Hera. But guys, it doesn't get any more legitimately awful than this. She's entitled. 
> 
> Also on this note, Hera's not one to give up. As long as she has a path to take she'll take it, no matter how difficult or unlikely. When she doesn't have a path to take, though, she's in trouble. Her instinct is to find some way to fix this situation, because Hera Syndulla Doesn't Give Up. But she can't fix it, so every direction she goes here is just...floundering desperately for what to do. 
> 
> As for what's going on with the pregnancy and whether or not it is okay... She's really not very far along. That thing is just a bundle of cells packed in a lot of cushioning right now. It's better protected than her heart or lungs or intestines. As long as those things are okay, the embryo's going to be okay. 
> 
> But shouldn't she be taking it easy and protecting her child right now? Nah, I don't think so. I think that attitude is exactly what Hera's afraid of when she debates having the kid. She knows that if she doesn't fight and win she and all of her friends will die, and the child isn't a child--it's just an embryo and an idea right now, while there are real people out there whom she loves who need her help. So she does allow herself that moment of worry, and then she puts it away because if she lets it slow her down, she is going to get killed.


	4. Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Sabine’s not a teenager anymore, she thought abruptly.  
> Where is everybody going? she wondered, panicked.  
> Ezra was not dead, and she didn’t know what to feel. Should she grieve him? Was it naive to hold out hope?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter tonight, three scenes put together, all while they're still on Lothal.

With the entire planet of Lothal behind them, they had expected clean up to be easy. And it  _ was _ easy for the most part, capturing the odd Imperial who had missed Kallus’ order. There was nothing they could do about plain bad luck. 

Five stormtroopers piling out of the last gunship. Sabine had already tossed the charge that would blow it up, Hera had already accepted their surrender, when one of them decided to take a stand for the Empire and toss her bodily towards the ship. 

Less than a second later it blew, shrapnel and ash flying on every side. Hera hit the ground but there was no cover. She didn’t even have time to feel fear. 

When the first noise of the blast faded—then there was time for panic. Thinking. Okay, she was still thinking so she must not be dead. Was she dying? She felt her arms, her legs, up her torso, the back of her head. 

“Hera!” Sabine screamed. Her ears rang.

Injury might be okay—not like the drugs they’d given her. At this point, injury would only hurt  _ her _ .

Her hands came away clean. Not a drop of blood. It was impossible. It was impossible. She should be dead. 

“Hera!” Sabine shouted again, and then she was kneeling in front of Hera. 

I’m alive, Hera thought, terrified and euphoric. I’m alive. She opened her mouth to say it, but that’s not what came out. 

Instead she looked at Sabine, wild with glee, and said, “I’m pregnant.” 

 

… 

  
  
They left each other holos regularly that nobody watched; the whole crew did it. It had started as “if I die” messages after a particularly close call when Kanan, Hera, and Chopper were the only spectres. If I die, I don’t want to leave you alone. If I die, here is what I would say to you. That was morbid, though, and they kept NOT dying, so eventually it turned into kind of a joke, little moments that they wanted to record if only to laugh at the other person about something again later. “If I die, don’t try to make spaghetti, okay? You’ll poison everyone.” “If I die, remember that ‘meiloorun’ is the code word.” In jokes like that. 

Kanan had recorded a new one while she was gone. Short, from the looks of it. Hera found it when she was searching for the munitions manifests Sabine had uploaded and, after the first sharp shock of pain, called up the file. If she waited she’d never do it.

“Hera.” He was there, bearded and masked still, a tiny form in front of her like when they talked on the comms from far away. “If you’re seeing this…” a heavy sigh. “Look. Many things are in motion right now, and I don’t know what’s coming, but it’s something big. Something I’m not allowed to see and that…” He stopped and thought, his lips straightening in the frown she knew so well. “I’m not afraid. But... I don’t want you to be hurt. I don’t ever want you to be hurt, or frightened, or regretful. So I guess I’d better tell you that I know. About… I know that you’re pregnant.” He laughed. “Thought the Force was messing with me until you stopped drinking caf.” Hera put her hand to her mouth to press the tears back in so she wouldn’t miss anything. “And it’s okay that you haven’t said anything,” he continued, “even though I thought we’d been over this and you weren’t going to close off when you got scared. ” He was smiling, though, laughing at her. You’re terrible. Why don’t you tell me things until after the hard part is over? It was just a joke at this point. His mouth twisted into that affectionate wry look and he focused straight on the camera, more serious. “I hope you know that I’ll be there with you no matter what you decide. We’ve had that conversation already. You know that, right?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“But I think you’re sitting on this for a reason. You can punch me if I’m wrong, but I think… if you knew what you wanted, you would have just told me right away. I think you want this baby, and Hera — ” he took the mask off and rubbed the bridge of his nose the way he did when he was tired or about to cry or just debating something with himself. “You’re never going to watch this,” he muttered by way of justification. Then he took a deep breath. “So do I. I want it, too.” He glanced over his shoulder. Someone was calling him off camera. “Gotta go. I love you both.”

 

… 

 

She couldn’t think about Ezra right away. It hurt too much. She had nothing but rage and loneliness, and she couldn’t formulate her position. 

When that faded a little, she thought, “Not you too, Ezra. Please please please please don’t do this to us.” 

Sabine took it even harder than she did, fixating on what Ezra’s message had meant as if she needed to atone. “It’s not your fault,” Hera kept telling her. “If he hadn’t disappeared like that, we’d all be dead, Ezra too. You did the right thing.” She could see Sabine trying to take her words to heart, but there was nothing that could sidetrack that girl’s thoughts once she’d started to dwell on something.

Sabine’s not a teenager anymore, she thought abruptly.

Where is everybody going? she wondered, panicked.

Ezra was not dead, and she didn’t know what to feel. Should she grieve him? Was it naive to hold out hope?

She tried reaching out to him through the Force. He wasn’t as attuned to her as Kanan had been, and she didn’t know how far away he’d gone, but he’d used some crazy new skills lately. It was possible that he might hear her. Ezra, she thought as hard as she could. We need you. She put all of her pain and longing behind it, knowing he’d move the stars to get back to them if he got the message. We miss you. We miss you so much.

It took her a couple of hours to realize how selfish that was. Ezra was out there alone in a ship full of enemies, having jumped Force knows where. He needed help, not another demand. So she closed her eyes and breathed deeply and steadied herself — Kanan wasn’t the only one who could do that — and she sent another message: I’m not giving up on you. Come home.


	5. Broken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Once they returned to Yavin, two things happened at almost the same time:   
> 1) She got very, very sick.   
> 2) She broke."

Once they returned to Yavin, two things happened at almost the same time:   
1) She got very, very sick.   
2) She broke. 

Oh, she still went to briefings and made plans and flew reconnaissance, especially at first. But she was just going through the motions, and she couldn’t remember much of what was said afterwards. Truthfully, she spent her time just trying to breathe past the vice-grip grief had on her lungs. Walking across the runway—he wasn’t there. Planning missions with the crew—not there. Heading home after a training session—he wouldn’t be there, and his bunk would be dark and cold. She measured her life in half-hours. Just get through this one. Only five more minutes and the next one starts. She went to bed every night feeling that she’d failed profoundly, but there wasn’t really much to do outside of the usual routine. 

When she flew, she almost enjoyed it. The moment when the Ghost broke cloud cover and hit sunlight, the lurch as she dropped back down to skim the top of the clouds… She was soaring, and if she let it, it would still feel like freedom. That was dangerous. If she let joy in, all the horror of their loss would come rushing back, too. She had to keep her eyes one step in front of her and wall off anything else. 

Sabine had stayed on Lothal. Hera and Zeb walked around the Ghost like...ghosts. Sometimes they were present, talking to each other, sometimes they dissipated into a memory. Chopper asked them things three times and had to start prodding shins before he got a response. Hera looked at Chop and Zeb and Rex and her pilots and tried to remember what sort of things people said to each other. 

She got herself to a counselor, not because she wanted to solve any huge existential crisis but because she’d been hurt to death and it wasn’t fair to put all of that on her friends, who had also been hurt. She looked forward to talking every week, a steady babble of stories about Kanan and Ezra and things that didn’t work without them. (She hadn’t prepared food in years, and her cooking had barely surpassed the won’t-poison-you point before that.) One day she’d SEEN Kanan, the ponytail and the curve of shoulder and waist, standing there by a box of crates in the hangar. She’d frozen in place, heart pounding and breath coming shallow. Then he’d turned around and the man hadn’t actually looked like Kanan at all, and she wondered how her eyes could have played such tricks on her. 

“In other circumstances,” the counselor had told her, “We would have you on antidepressants, just for a little while. I don’t think it’s a good idea to put new medication in your body just now, though.” She’d have to tough it out. 

Months later Hera would find out that the waiting list for counselors in the Rebellion was kilometers long. They must have skipped her up the list; can’t have a general half-functional with grief. That wasn’t fair. 

She hadn’t felt quite well since Lothal, but none of them had. When her stomach began to roil in earnest, she assumed it was due to poor eating habits. They’d been wandering around in a fog, forgetting to eat. She’d find ration bars opened with two bites taken out of them in odd rooms of the ship. Alexsandr Kallus, of all people, noticed what was going on and took over their meal planning. He brought them pre-packaged hot food and forced them to set alarms and sit down at the table to eat. After that she and Zeb policed each other, but instead of getting better, the nausea got worse. 

She was sitting in front of the most innocuous salad ever made when she finally admitted what the problem was. Spinach, cantriban apples, and some sort of dried fruit she could probably eat around—it didn’t even have dressing. (And when had she gotten so picky, by the way?) 

If she ate one bite, she was going to vomit. 

“Hera,” Zeb warned, chewing his own food mechanically. 

“...Okay.” She took one bite, then another. All right, those had gone down. She— 

She rushed to the fresher and threw up spectacularly. 

Zeb held her lekku back, took her temperature (normal), and put her to bed. The next day she commed the med center to see if they could give her something. They could, but it didn’t do a bit of good. Three days and twenty-eight vomiting spells later, she found herself actually IN the med center with a needle in her arm, being pumped full of fluids and anti-nausea medication. She hadn’t had so much as a sip of water in two days.

“Human hormones in your system. That’s going to throw your body for a loop,” the medical droid told her cheerfully. Great, a new one who hadn’t adjusted his bedside manner programming to the battlefield yet. “You’re just this side of being admitted.” If she wasn’t quite sick enough for the big guns, she wondered how other women survived. 

As soon as she stood up, she vomited most of what they’d pumped into her.

They sent her home, and Zeb checked on her every hour or two throughout the day and gave her little sips of water. Chopper stayed in her room all night long, keeping a comforting eye on her. At least she wasn’t alone-alone. And the physical misery was so intense that she couldn’t think about the deeper misery of their absence. Silver linings. 

“You won’t die,” all of the medical professionals kept telling her, as if that were a comfort. Neither loss nor nausea would actually kill her. Oh, no. She got to look forward to ages and ages of pain, sickness that continued indefinitely, and nobody could tell her when it would start to get better. 

She couldn’t even crawl into work, so she had to tell her superiors about the pregnancy long before the danger of miscarriage had passed. She was placed on indefinite leave, right after making general. “Just come in when you can.” Were Mon Mothma and Dodonna and the others irritated at her lack of performance, or was she reading into the situation? Anyway, what else could she do? 

Three days after that, Zeb checked on her to find her huddled on the bunk as usual. “Hera,” he said quietly. 

She looked up but couldn’t bring herself to talk. 

“Karabast, you look awful.” 

She wanted to pull a face at him, some sort of wry grimace to let him know that she felt awful, too, and to make him laugh, but her only hope for not vomiting was holding perfectly still. Even facial muscles couldn’t afford to move. 

“That’s it,” he said. He lifted her carefully into his arms, and Hera moaned, “no, no, no, no,” and twisted herself down to get to the bucket on the floor. After she threw up, she had a few moments reprieve from the nausea, during which Zeb carried her to the med center (so embarrassing), deposited her on one of the gurneys, drew himself up to his full, intimidating height, and said “Fix her.” 

That night she heard him on the comm with Sabine: “...doing okay, Kallus is keeping us well organized and Chopper was always a grumpy beast, but I don’t see how she can go on like this… Yeah.” A longer pause. “Don’t like the idea of you alone out there, either. How are you holding up?” She missed the rest of the murmured conversation, drifting in and out of sleep, waking only to hear Zeb answer some question with a weighty sigh. “I don’t know.” 

The next morning it became clear that the new medicine had taken the edge off, and she began to get better. 

Then the dreams started. They came every night for a year. 

None of them was really a nightmare, or few of them, anyway. In most, Kanan was alive. He’d escaped miraculously and gone into hiding, he was waiting for her just behind this door… Sometimes it seemed that Kanan himself was nearby, usually shadowy, not in a form she could touch or see. Always, Hera remembered that this wasn’t true. “He’s dead,” she told the person with her. “How can I have this? He died.” Always, her subconscious made up some excuse for him to live. The rush of relief and thankfulness threatened to keel her over, and then she woke up. He was still dead. 

A few times she dreamed of sex, her legs spread, Kanan buried between them, her head thrown back and both of their sweat on her body. The dream didn’t really capture the experience, though. She woke aching and ready to come, so she slipped a hand down, around the growing roundness of her abdomen, and finished herself off. Those dreams weren’t so bad. 

Once she dreamt of blood. She was on Lothal and some sort of creature had just given birth, lothcat or lothwolf. She followed the trail of blood, trying to find the pup or kit before it died of exposure. That one made her wake in a panic, pressing a hand between her legs. Red dreams, these were called in Ryl. They mirrored the body. Her hand came away clean though, and the baby stirred sleepily inside of her. Everything was okay. 

A few times they were keeping Kanan from her. Usually this was someone specific—poor Kallus was a popular target, although it could also be Rebel Command, and once it was even Ahsoka. She screamed at them, then pleaded. All she wanted was his location. She could get herself there. He wanted to see her, she was sure of it. Why wouldn’t they just TELL her? 

She wasn’t foolish enough to think these scenarios were Force visions. Something similar had happened when the Empire dredged the tunnels on Cazne, the last childhood home in which she’d been happy. She’d dreamed of finding them miraculously intact every night for months. 

As the year drew to its close, one dream came to her vividly: Kanan himself, standing in front of her as he’d been when they were younger, scruffy chin-beard and blue-green eyes. He was smiling at her and telling her something, but she couldn’t hear him over the sound of her own grateful sobbing. Then he crossed the space between them and put his hand on her stomach, although in the waking world Jace had been born by that point. 

“You’re alive,” she sobbed. 

“Well...No, I’m not.” 

“Oh, don’t be so literal. You know what I mean. You EXIST.” 

“Yeah, but… I have to exist over here. I’m so sorry I can’t be with you.” 

But she shook her head. “I can deal with that as long as you’re somewhere. Not gone.” 

“Not gone,” he confirmed. “Right over here. Still yours.” 

After that the dreams tapered off.


	6. Games and Wagers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The sun rose the next day and life went on. Hera hated that phrase. She went back to training pilots long before her stomach could handle flying."

Game night was the very worst thing that had ever happened to Hera. She’d never bothered to rank before, though the moment when Ezra told her Kanan was really gone...that was right up there. Still, she was tough, she knew she was tough, she knew that even this year wasn’t going to kill her. Sometimes that knowledge helped, but on game night it was just another twist of the knife.

Sabine had joined them, leaving Ketsu on Lothal. (“Even if the Empire does attack, I know this lady who can get me through a blockade.”) And Kallus and Rex were frequent visitors, trooping in and out of the Ghost in their off time, mostly just sitting with what remained of her crew and watching trash shows on the net when they felt too shell-shocked to talk.

And then one day a couple of months in, they felt well enough to try to do something. Let’s have a little fun, Hera told them.

The first game night was fine. She huddled under a blanket in the rattan chair and watched Sabine get way too serious about beating Kallus at Cubikahd. (Alexsandr, she reminded herself. It was still strange.) Everyone had an okay time, so they decided to do it again the next week.

By the third game night, Sabine had returned to Lothal and Hera felt well enough to kick Zeb’s butt at dejarik. Actually, she was probably losing. She was pretty sure Chopper moved the pieces to give her the advantage every time they turned their backs. At any rate, Rex wasn’t really choking on anything, and his poorly muffled laughter meant that something was up.

“Hah!” She took Zeb’s second-to-last savrik and the writing was on the wall. “You are going down!”

“You and that droid are menaces,” Zeb groused. “Why don’t you send him to his recharging station and fight fair?”

It was kind of fun.

At the end of the night Rex said, “See you next week,” and that’s when it hit Hera. Game night had become a tradition.

They had a new tradition and Kanan knew nothing about it. He would never know. She had a life without him, now.

Hera had spent the last few months stuck in a gateway of pain and shock. On one side Kanan was with her, arguing about plans and bringing her caf and occasionally snoring annoyingly into her neck while she tried to sleep. That was the past. On the other… She didn’t know what. She was a general and a mother and the galaxy kept revolving without him. She’d been trapped in that moment of his death, nursing the pain like it might keep him from leaving her. And now she was being dragged out the other side into an eternity in which he was Never. Coming. Back.

“Hera?”

Zeb had returned from seeing their guests out. She was messy crying, snot already mixing with the tears. Zeb folded himself onto the bench next to her, weeping too, and they wrapped their arms around each other and held on for dear life.

…

 

The sun rose the next day and life went on. Hera hated that phrase. She went back to training pilots long before her stomach could handle flying.

She was mid-speech in a briefing room several weeks later when Arryn raised his hand. “General, I have a question.” All of her pilots had been murmuring the last few weeks, dancing around what they wanted to ask her, and that kid never spoke unless it was to say something smart alek. Well, better to head him off.

“Yes, I’m pregnant,” she said brusquely.

The room erupted into howls and a few groans.

“Yeah! Ten credits, pay up,” Mart told Wedge.

“Wait a minute—were you all betting on whether or not I was pregnant?”

“Uhm....” Mart blushed. “No.”

The room went abruptly, sheepishly quiet until Arryn raised his hand again. “We were betting on whether or not you and Commander Jarrus were banging.”

She could have heard a pin drop.

“I see.” She let them squirm for a minute longer. “And… How many of you won money in this bet?”

Reluctant hands raised, more than half the room. She looked them over carefully then said, “I’ll take five credits from each of you.”

It was weirdly comforting to have Kanan acknowledged, even if it was by a group of mostly boys who were still in their teens and stank of uncontrolled hormones. And they were _her_ idiot boys—she knew they wished her well. Still…

“If I ever catch you doing something like that again, I’ll let Chopper drain half your fuel and then you can go up against me in a dogfight,” Hera told them severely.

Arryn spoke up again. “Yes sir, we understand. We won’t get caught.”


	7. Reprieve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She stayed for three weeks and completed the requisite reports about Lothal’s defenses, but the Empire had left it alone so far, and this time was almost like a vacation. She used the time to rest and think about...well...herself. It was the strangest sensation, not being alone in her own body, and she hadn’t really begun to process it."
> 
> Here, have a chapter that's just nice and indulgent.

She was six months along when she went to check on Lothal, just her, leaving Chop and Zeb behind with AP-5 and Kallus. Sabine met Hera in the hangar, her whole face lighting up when Hera descended the ramp. “Look at you!” 

Hera laughed as they hugged. “Oh, I know. Want to feel something?”

“Yes!”

She put Sabine’s hand to her abdomen and the baby kicked obligingly.

“Oh, good Force. That’s him?”

“I certainly hope so.”

Hera generally wasn’t crazy about people touching her stomach. Or asking her how she was feeling or how much longer she had, or any of that. She was still a respected pilot and not just a baby incubator, thank you very much, and these things distracted from work. Sabine, though — Sabine was practically herself, and Sabine’s joy was Hera’s joy.

They took a speeder into the city. “Which way?” Hera asked.

“Bridgers’ house.”

“Not Ezra’s tower?”

“Sometimes. It’s easier to get things done when I stay in the city, though.”

So they drove down the rebuilt streets, larger and more elegant than they’d been before the Empire, and they garnered quite a few stares along the way. “What is THAT about?”

“Oh,” Sabine rolled her eyes. “We’re the heroes of Lothal.”

“Still?!”

“You should see the statue they’re erecting in the center of town.”

“Oh, no,” Hera groaned.

“You’ve just got to let them enjoy it,” Sabine told her. “I’ll take you down Syndulla Avenue later.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m really not.”

Hera entered the house calling, “Honey, we’re home!” to embarrass Sabine, but it just earned her a laugh.

“Nice try. Ketsu said she’d take off for a few weeks and give us our space. She’s still got some kind of financial interests in the Devra system.”

“Oh yeah?” Hera raised an eyebrow. 

“Not Black Sun, but…” Sabine slid thumb against fingers, miming holding credits. “...lucrative.” 

“Well, that sounds totally legal.”

“Ask her no questions… Anyway, it’s just us right now, like old times.”

“Last time it was just us I think we ended up hoping the explosives would last until we were rescued.”

“Yeah, well, let’s do it differently this time.”

She stayed for three weeks and completed the requisite reports about Lothal’s defenses, but the Empire had left it alone so far, and this time was almost like a vacation. She used the time to rest and think about...well...herself. It was the strangest sensation, not being alone in her own body, and she hadn’t really begun to process it.

Her second night there, before she stepped into the gorgeous, claw-footed bathtub (“thank you for everything you’ve done for my life, Mira Bridger”), Hera took a look at herself in the mirror. Most of the time her view was top-down, which made her resemble nothing so much as a pregnant bantha. But from the side… She peered with interest. Her breasts were huge, but her abdomen had finally eclipsed them, and there was a certain elegance to the roundness that she didn’t normally see. Like...what? Like full solar sails, that was the curve. She looked good. Kanan, you would have lost your mind over this, she thought.  

Then the baby kicked, a little foot-shaped mound distending her stomach, and that was bizarre enough to dispel any vanity. Okay, into the bath. “Calm down in there, you.”  

By the third day of her visit, Sabine had had it with her wardrobe. To be fair, it was a bit...cobbled together, consisting mostly of old stretch pants and Kanan’s shirts, which came down far enough to keep the pants from being embarrassing. And these things did not exactly match. But there weren’t many maternity clothes available on a hidden Rebel base, and Hera had a full schedule most of the time anyway and just didn’t think about things like that. 

Which is probably why, when she emerged on that third morning wearing gray sweats and Kanan’s tan button-down, Sabine told her, “You look ridiculous.”

“Hey!” she protested.

“You know I don’t mean it like that. You’re gorgeous. In fact, I still think you should let me paint that nude.”

“We’ve discussed this.”

“Fine, fine. But your ensemble here — ” Sabine waved a finger at her, “ — it needs some work. We’re going shopping.”

“I still have to get to the old industrial complex and check their manifests.”

“You walk out like that and everyone’s going to stare at you.”

“I don’t care.”

“And then they’re going to figure out who you are and want your autograph.” 

She made a fair point. “All right,” Hera told her. “Let’s go shopping.” 

They ended up in a well-stocked boutique just off the main market, Sabine and the shopkeeper chattering excitedly about what she should try on and gathering an armful of things that looked… kind of delicate and flowy. Hera was skeptical. 

“Go.” Sabine shoved the stack into her arms and shooed her towards the curtained dressing room, calling after her, “I want to see them!” 

So she tried a few things on, and she had to admit it felt good not to stuff herself into too-small pants, for once. There were scarves and kerchiefs too, which was nice. Even she knew that the pilot’s cap didn’t exactly go with civilian clothing. 

“Are you going to let me see?” Sabine called. 

“Just a minute!” 

Hera spread one of the scarves over her head then wrapped each end around the base of her lekku and tied them together in the back, her hands remembering the simple twists from childhood. Then she looked in the mirror and saw her own mother.

Sure, the earrings were missing and the face a little different, but… She tilted her chin up a bit, and there was the imperious look she remembered so well, the one that had made Cham do whatever she wanted. Mama, Hera thought. I still miss you so much.

“Hera, did you fall asleep in there?”

“Just a minute!” Okay, enough of this. She slipped on the next dress, a peach-colored thing in simple, Lothali style. It cinched with a drawstring just under her breasts, and that definition made a huge difference. She didn’t look like a giant blurrg anymore. In fact, she looked...pretty. Hmm. Really pretty. It wasn’t exactly her usual style, but it did fit.

“What about this?” she asked Sabine, stepping through the curtain. 

“Oh, wow,” Sabine said. “You look… Please let me paint a nude.” 

“No!”

“Well, you’re getting that dress.” 

“Yes, you will be excellent advertising,” the shopkeeper told her. 

“We’ll take five.”

“Sabine! Two. And the pants and shirts. I can’t wear the dress to work.” 

She did wear it to the market, though, feeling like a stranger playacting some part. Unlike so many places where her crew stuck out like a sore thumb, Lothal had always been a planet of immigrants. Now she was just one more pregnant Twi’lek woman buying her groceries. The anonymity was nice.

After so many years it was impossible not to keep an eye out for trouble, though, which is probably why she was the only one to spot the single still figure in the bustling crowd.

A Twi’lek child. Was she seeing things? Hera blinked. No, she was still there, a little girl of four or five. Hera scanned the area around her and didn’t see parents nearby. Of course, that was a huge assumption. Who was to say that the child’s guardians had to be Twi’lek? Still...she looked again. Nobody seemed to be paying attention. It might be worth a check.

“Hi,” she asked the child. “Are you lost?”

She got a panicked stare.

“Are your parents around here?” 

Nothing.

On a hunch, she tried it in Ryl. “Do you need help?”

The girl’s face melted into a paroxysm of relief and she nodded. 

“Are you missing your grown-up?” 

“Mama was right here, but now I can’t find her.” The shrill voice was strangely accented. Where had she come from?

“Well… Let’s see. I’m sure she’s looking for you, but it’s very crowded. What if I pick you up so she can see you and we just stay here for a minute?”

The little girl nodded and Hera hefted her on a hip. “I’m Hera,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Telia.”

“I have a cousin called Telia. She’s older than you, though.”

Finding that she was no longer isolated in a sea of Basic-speaking strangers, Telia relaxed quickly. “I have a cousin! She’s here with us. And my Mama and Papa are here but my aunt got taken away, and that’s why my cousin lives at my house now.”  

“I hate that, when people get taken away,” Hera told her. “It doesn’t feel very good, does it?”

Telia shrugged. “We live here now, and I like it better.” 

“Where did you live before?” 

“Tzeba.”

Tzeba. Not exactly the center of Imperial efforts against Twi’leks, but a popular target for slavers and gangs, which was...maybe worse. 

“But Papa and Mama said Lothal is safe now. I play outside and I go to school,” she said proudly. 

“Do you?” Hera asked. “You must know a lot.” Ah, there. A Twi’lek woman pushing towards her through the crowd, relief written on her face. 

“Telia, you scared me to death,” the woman said, taking the child from Hera and switching to Basic. “Thank you. I was three stalls down before I realized she hadn’t kept up.” 

“Not a problem,” Hera told her. “We just had a chat while we waited for you.” 

She hugged her daughter tightly, then asked, “How many times have I told you to stay close by me?” Then she turned to Hera. “I told her if she ever gets lost to find a mother and ask for help. Teli, you remember how to ask for help in Basic, right?” 

“She speaks Ryl,” Telia said carelessly. 

Hera laughed and spoke Ryl. “I think you lucked out, little one.” 

The mother’s mouth dropped open in delight. “Do you live here? We’re familiar with the Twi’lek community, but they’re mostly second or third generation, and it’s been a hard adjustment.” 

“Sadly, I’m just visiting a friend,” Hera told her.

“Well, thank you so much, really, if there’s anything I can do to thank you — ” 

“All I did was stand here for a minute with her.” 

“All I did was look at the big cranes and then  _ you’re _ the one who kept walking,” Telia put in.

“Just wait and see—” Telia’s mother rolled her eyes in that style that was particularly Twi’lek, that still spoke to Hera of home. “ — They get away from you so fast, even when you’re holding their hands.” 

“Yes,” Hera told her. “I know.” 

“Better that it happen here than most other places, I suppose.” 

She wondered how many immigrants were coming into Lothal each month. She’d need to check the numbers with Sabine.

“Mamaaaaa,” Telia whined. “You said ice cream!” 

“Ice cream, huh?” Hera laughed, “I’d better let you go, then.” 

“I said maybe ice cream,  _ if _ you were good.” The woman turned back to Hera. “Thank you again, and clear skies with your own, there.” She touched Hera’s stomach lightly, then turned to leave. 

Clear skies. On Ryloth they believed that a baby born under clear skies would travel far enough to escape all the bad fates. Nobody told an expecting mother “good luck” — they said “clear skies.” And always with a touch to give some of your own luck to the child. Twi’lek hospitality. Hera swallowed against the tightness in her throat. She wasn’t aware the custom had traveled so far. 

Walking away, Telia’s mother murmured a question and the little girl’s answer came back to her clearly: “Hera.” 

General Syndulla, war hero, saves the day again, she thought wryly.


	8. Scarif and Victory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey!” Zeb caught her at the ramp. “You have GOT to be kidding me.”  
> “Why?”  
> “Because that child is about to drop out of you at any moment, that’s why!”  
> “It’s not an X-wing, Zeb. G Force isn’t that bad in the Ghost.”  
> “So you’re going to fly into battle?”

Yavin IV was busy, busy, busy. One of their spies had tied Order 13 to a program called “Stardust,” and they had something to do at last, just trying to unwind it all. Some sort of doomsday machine.

“Better that than those Defenders,” Hera remarked.

“Would you rather fight one convor the size of a rancor,” Zeb asked, “or a hundred rancors the size of convors?”

Sabine had come back from Lothal with her. “You’re funny,” she told Zeb.

“Hey, trying times! Somebody’s got to make an attempt at humor.” 

“And we appreciate the attempt, Zeb,” Hera said, patronizing.

“You two always team up on me! I miss the boys.”

Sabine stuck her tongue out at him.

By night they were reading everything they could about babies, scrambling to get ready. “These texts are stupid!” Sabine would complain, waving a datapad. “They give directly contradictory information! And then they tell you you’re evil if you don’t do what they say.” 

“What I want to know is how any babies have managed to survive at all, if you judge by the number of things you can screw up,” Zeb commented.

Chopper didn’t think it would be very hard. Ten pound Kanan Jarrus had to be easier to control than the larger version.

“Show me the science behind any of this!” Sabine continued her tirade. “This is all just opinion. Somebody has to have done good double blind studies on babies somewhere in this galaxy.”

When her own soon-to-be-baby kept her from sleeping, Hera scoured the holonet for anything related to hybrid Twi’lek/human children. Despite the presence of what had to have been millions of children, they were statistically so rare that the medical studies weren’t particularly… informative. She had to resort to getting information from that least trustworthy of holonet locations, the messageboard. She took everything with about fifty grains of salt. “A hybrid child is special,” one woman wrote, just before advising sticking magnets to the baby’s skin to call down Force powers. Hera rolled her eyes. One father very practically advised: “Raise them somewhere diverse and the identity crisis won’t be much.” A third brutally honest mother said, “If you’re a human woman, just go straight for the c-section. It’s going to happen anyway.”

And there were pictures… A three-year-old with short lekku and marbled skin. A ten-year-old who had just won a sports tournament standing next to his father, whom he looked nothing like. A little girl with blue skin and two blue ponytails in place of lekku. Most of those children made through genetic matching and implanted embryos, wanted and tried for for years…

Most hybrid pregnancies didn’t make it, she discovered, the genetics too mismatched to create a viable child. Those invariably ended in early pregnancy, though, and the consensus was that any fetus who made it this far was probably safe. Hera recalled the weirdly appropriate adage about not counting your chickens before they’d hatched, but she wasn’t too worried. Any kid that could kick like that was bound to be healthy. And he looked good on all the scans.

The scans… 

“Everything in the right place, everything the right size,” the technician had said at her last visit. “He’s playing with his hands. And look at this! Do you see that?”

Hera did not.

“He’s already got hair.”

Hair. Her child. 

She should really have seen that coming, but it completely floored her.

She was thirty-nine weeks along—nearly full term for a human, not quite full term for a Twi’lek—when the Battle of Scarif took place. And she was too kriffing fat to make it to the war room when they called her. 

But she heard the speech the Erso girl gave in replay, and she could have kicked herself for not being there to give it momentum. “What chance do we have?” They were Hera’s own words, angrier and more jaded, perhaps, more desperate, but the sentiment the same. “The question is what CHOICE?” Fight now or die.

When the klaxons went off, Hera all but ran towards the Ghost. 

“Hey!” Zeb caught her at the ramp. “You have GOT to be kidding me.”

“Why?”

“Because that child is about to drop out of you at any moment, that’s why!”

“It’s not an X-wing, Zeb. G Force isn’t that bad in the Ghost.”

“So you’re going to fly into battle?”

Objectively, was her child’s life was more valuable than her own, or Zeb’s, or that of anybody else in the galaxy who would be murdered if they didn’t succeed? “Yes,” she answered.  

“Hera, you’re—”

“Look,” she snapped. “It’s now or never for this fight. I’d rather have him die clean, not knowing any pain, than be hunted slowly, terrified. Or taken into some camp…” She trailed off. Did Zeb even know what she was imagining? Where did he think those Inquisitors came from? No, she’d rather have her child die now, with her.

Not that dying was going to happen. 

“I’ve got nose gun,” Sabine called.

“Okay, okay,” Zeb grumbled. “IF you’re really going, nobody’s getting turret gun but me!”

From the Phantom’s rear guns, Chopper demanded to know what they were waiting for.

“Good, then,” Hera grinned. “Let’s go take some back from the Empire.”

Rex waved them off. “Good luck!”

“We don’t need luck!” Sabine told him. “We’ve got the Force!”

 

…

 

Scarif. Graveyard, the word would come to mean. Hera flew like she’d never flown in her life, the hundreds of ships around her tinged with light at the corners of her vision, her hands and mind just a half-step ahead of the chaos. This, strangely, was her peak. She kept them alive.

But they had to get that stupid kriffing planetary shield down. “Are you listening to the Admiral? Bombing runs!” she shouted over the chaos on the comms. “Aim for the ring! None of this matters if you don’t get the shield down!” They were still just flying defensive though, few of them even able to mount a run. And those who did were blown into shrapnel after one pass.

“Karabast!” Zeb had missed a line-up shot at two TIEs. It had been a bad angle anyway, and if they’d stayed there for another three seconds to get the shot, another fighter would have finished them off quickly.

“Hey!” Hera called over the pilot’s channel. “HEY! Get your heads on and work together! Y-wings make the bombing strikes, X-wings run defensive! Holy Force, people, get in the game!”

After that they got a couple more shots in. And then Admiral Raddus brought in the new hammerhead corvette, that beautiful beast of a ship, and Hera got to watch one of the more glorious wrecks of her career, that thing diving and just PLOWING through metal and it was… victory.

Pyrrhic victory. 

They’d gotten the information out. Vader’s ship chased the Tantive IV away just before they jumped, but Tantive was fast, and they’d make it.

The Ghost came out of hyperspace a short jump later, one of the three steps that would take them back to Yavin.

“Holy kriff, Hera, that was some flying!” Sabine declared.

“Yeah.” She was still waiting for her breathing to recover. The Ghost’s shields were at more than half.

“You know if they chase Tantive IV down, they’re going to be coming for Yavin next,” Zeb told her.

“Yeah.”

“Did you SEE that thing? It’s operational.”

Chopper suggested several rude technical malfunctions he’d like to perform on that thing.

“Yeah, Chop, you show them.” Hera rolled her eyes.

“Hera—” From the nose gun, Sabine turned to look up at her, that straight-browed fretful face that she made. “Don’t go back to Yavin. It’s time for a break. Fly to Lothal.”

Her stomach twisted painfully at the suggestion. No, not her stomach—her uterus was taking up all the room these days.

“You can comm them that you’ve gone on leave. You should have gone a week ago.”

She did feel a little funny. Post-battle adrenaline probably, but who was to say?

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“Chopper, get down here and chart a course for Lothal.”


	9. Lothal and Loss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She read. “Ketsu! Zeb! Get in here!”  
> “What is it? Is—?”  
> “Alderaan,” Hera cut Zeb off. “It’s gone.” 
> 
> PSA: No baby yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter tonight. An insanely long chapter tomorrow.

She wasn’t in labor when they got there. Zeb had looked at her face once she initiated the hyperspace jump and done his prickly panic thing, because it was TEN HOURS TO LOTHAL and what if they didn’t make it in time?! But Hera had rolled her eyes. These weren’t even real contractions; they were rehearsal. 

In fact she had visited the med center on Lothal and been sent “home” to the Bridgers’ residence before anything else happened, and even then it wasn’t much. Just a weird...contraction? Her abdomen clenched hard, out of nowhere, at the same time the baby went wild, striking out with what had to be all four limbs. It caught her off-guard and she didn’t muffle the moan very well, so Chop and Zeb and Sabine and even Ketsu all came running. “Nothing,” she told them. “I’m fine.” The sun had set, the night on Lothal clear and full of stars even in the city, but something dark touched her heart.

She showered; they all ate a good meal and went to bed. Everyone else fell asleep. Gravity plus active baby weren’t letting Hera get much sleep these days, so she called up the galactic headlines and scanned through articles, shifting from foot to foot in an effort to get comfortable, Chopper bored next to her. No mention of Scarif, which shouldn’t have surprised her. Jeddha was on the back page at this point. Alderaan —

Sabine heard the sharp cry and must have rocketed out of bed. “What? Is it time? Sit down! You look like you’re going to  _ fall _ down!” Hera only gestured at the screen. 

She read. “Ketsu! Zeb! Get in here!” 

“What is it? Is — ?” 

“Alderaan,” Hera cut Zeb off. “It’s gone.” 

“What do you mean it’s gone? Alderaan, like the planet Alderaan?”    
  
Hera nodded. 

“We’re not talking about somebody’s pet lothcat here? Because I don’t see how you can misplace an entire pla — ” 

“It’s GONE!” Sabine shouted. “Not lost. Destroyed, blown out of orbit, and you KNOW how it happened if you’d stop and THINK for a second.” She was angry crying now, but the loss was so great that Hera could only feel numb. 

“Initial reports are confused,” she said woodenly. 

Sabine sniffed. “Yeah, well, we’re not confused.” 

Chopper thought they should have stopped that thing when they had a chance. 

“Shut up,” Sabine told him rudely. “We didn’t have a chance.” 

“I’m just glad you got yourselves back here alive.” Ketsu’s face also looked like thunder, but she knew better than to touch Sabine right now. 

“Stardust,” Hera mumbled. It was a morbid name.

Zeb plunked onto a stool next to them and they mostly sat in stunned silence, occasionally reading and commenting as new reports came in. 

Hera had pulled herself together enough to begin a note of consolation to Bail Organa — except she hadn’t begun it, she didn’t have a clue what she could possibly say — when an even more terrible thought occurred to her. Bail. 

“Was Senator Organa on Alderaan? What about his family?” 

“No reports on survivors yet,” Zeb said. 

“Comm Rebel Command.” 

Rebel Command was busy, but Rex sent them back a personal note: Bail Organa and family confirmed on planet, all dead. 

Ketsu made caf and Hera let herself have a cup. 

By sunrise she’d admitted that she was, in fact, in labor, though she didn’t tell the others right away, because they were getting a bit...jumpy. And then nothing much happened for a long time. And even then it was only Zeb and Sabine pestering her to go to the med center every time she ground her teeth on a contraction, while Chopper insisted that she could do what she wanted and Ketsu made an amazing looking breakfast and wisely stayed out of it. Hera reassured them and did the dishes, because the alternative was writing reports and nobody really cared about those reports now. 

When the contractions were coming four minutes apart and none too gentle, she agreed to go to the med center. She even let Sabine drive so as to avoid the argument. With Sabine at the wheel and the air on her face, she looked up at the cloudless blue sky and thought, “Nothing is ever going to be the same again.” It wasn’t a good sentiment or a bad one, though it could be frightening if she let it. So she changed tacks and thought of this whole thing like flying into battle, instead: Here we go again.


	10. Hard Fought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fifteen hours later she was feeling less blasé.  
> “What’s it like?” Zeb wanted to know.  
> “Being twisted and wrung out like a dish cloth. Not good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter depicts childbirth. It's not all that graphic, because it's from Hera's point of view and there are frankly parts of her body that she can't see. But it is blow-by-blow. If that's going to bother you, don't read.

Fifteen hours later she was feeling less blasé.

“What’s it like?” Zeb wanted to know.

“Being twisted and wrung out like a dish cloth. Not good.”

“Is it time to push yet?”

“No!” she ground out. The contraction started to ease. “Zeb, you’re making me nervous. Trade shifts and have Sabine come in.”

“All right, all right.” He patted the top of her head affectionately. “Going to get a few winks and an onion burger, then.”

“I will throw up on you without hesitation.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. Keep up the good fight, lady.”

She grinned at his back as he left.

And then it was Chopper’s turn to whine at her. It didn’t take this long to build an entire droid from the ground up. “Yes, but you’ve got a whole factory for that,” Hera told him. Then the next contraction started to climb and she bit down on the shirt tossed over her shoulder until it peaked. She’d sweated through her clothes and she was beginning to wonder if she really needed the cap on her head.

“You’re burning up,” the midwife told her. “Let me take that old shirt.”

Hera shooed her away and Chopper raised his electrical prod menacingly, but the hapless woman was saved from injury by Sabine’s entrance. “No!” Sabine crossed the room to them. “Leave the shirt. Hera, you want the arms around you?”

She nodded, a tight movement, and Sabine picked up the sleeves of Kanan’s green sweater and wrapped them over her shoulders more firmly. The contraction began to ease.

She continued her conversation with Chop as if they’d never left off. “This is normal, really. Not...ideal, but normal. I’m not going to die.”

Droids were much more efficient, he told her.

“Yeah, well, I agree.”

Then her midwife’s droid assistant checked her and she was dilated all of Three. Fucking. Centimeters.

“Your vocabulary has certainly taken a turn,” Sabine remarked.

“We could give you a nerve block,” the midwife offered. “Take the pain away.”

And slow labor down even more? Oh yeah, that sounded like a great idea. “No thanks,” Hera told her, bracing for the next contraction.

“If you keep this up you’ll be too tired to push.”

Nerve blocks would cut off all feeling from the waist down, and they could stall labor. Hers was close enough to stalled already. If she ended up with a c-section she’d be grounded from combat flight for two months. “I can manage it.” 

“Suit yourself, dear,” the midwife shrugged. She motioned to the medical droid to follow her. “I’ll be back in a bit. Ice chips,” she reminded Sabine.

“You want some ice chips?” Sabine asked her as the door shut and they were left alone.

Hera waited until she could breathe again to answer. “Yes, actually.”

Sabine handed her the cup and her comm chirruped across the room. 

“Nevermind. Can you get that?”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Then Sabine’s comm chirped. She read it and frowned. “Rebel Command frequency. It’s Yavin.” 

That couldn’t be good. “Put them through.”

General Dodonna appeared before her in miniature. “General Syndulla. It appears you’re having about as good a time as we are.” 

“Not on holo!” It looked like he’d had her on the big display in the war room, which was... mortifying.

“I’m sorry!” Sabine said, and Dodonna’s figure disappeared.

His voice stayed. “General, I’m sorry to intrude at a time like this, but I’m afraid we need your advice. I need— I have to brief our pilots in a little over an hour.” 

Contraction. She nodded before realizing that he couldn’t see it. “Go on,” Sabine said.

“The Death Star is on its way to Yavin.”

Sabine stifled a gasp. “You’ve got to get out of there.” 

“No,” Hera ground out. They had to destroy that thing now. If they couldn’t, the galaxy was already lost.

“No,” Dodonna said. “There’s no time.” They were actually going to stay and fight for once. “But Scarif worked. Princess Leia escaped Imperial custody and brought the schematics to us, and there IS a weakness.”

“Wait a minute, back up,” Sabine interjected. “Princess Leia of Alderaan? She’s alive?” 

“Alive and here and ready to see the battle through with the rest of us.”

That baby-faced teenager who had brought them the cruisers. She’d made it. The pain eased off. Bail, Hera thought. Do you know your daughter’s alive? Do you know what she did?

“There is a weakness,” Dodonna was saying. He explained and Hera rode through another contraction in the interim. “They’ve...given me the pilot’s briefing,” he finished. 

Wait a minute—enemy fighters, canons, and a trench to run with an impossibly small target at the end? It was a holovid game.

Sabine caught the look on her face and burst out laughing. “General, Hera can’t believe she’s missing this.”

I would destroy this level, Hera thought. “Okay.” She spoke fast. “Here’s what you do. The Death Star itself is mostly just a danger to Yavin. Expect surface canons, but those are fixed in place so the amount of damage they can do is limited. It’s the TIEs you have to watch out for. They’re faster and more maneuverable than anything we’ve got. Don’t let the pilots get bogged down in one-on-one combat.”

“Is there—” Dodonna asked, but she didn’t have time.

“Get as many fighters into the trench as you can. X-wings preferably, but whatever you have. Somebody’s going to have to clear out the canons, but that’s doable.” No, no, here came the next contraction and she didn’t have TIME for this.

“What next?”

“Contraction,” Sabine told him. “Just a minute.”

They waited a long two minute before it began to fade, then Hera jumped back in again. “TIEs have terrible shields. Keep everyone close in to the Death Star; all of those kids know how to play chicken with a TIE fighter.”

“...Chicken?”

“Outfly them and leave them to crash against the surface,” Sabine provided.

“Right. You get as many of our fighters running the trench as possible, smash the TIEs in the trench and on the Death Star’s surface, and just take shots at that port until you get it. It’s going to take a light touch, but they can do it.” She thought of that run with envy.

All right.” Dodonna sounded relieved. “We can do that. Anything else?”

“Yes. Tell those kids to watch each others’ backs. And they’ve got this one, Jan—make sure they know it.”

“I will. And General—” Dodonna was about to sign off and she would have no idea what happened until after it was over. “Clear skies,” he said.

How did he know? “Clear skies,” she wished him back. He could use it more than she could. “May the Force be with you.”

Then he was gone, the midwife here instead, and it was back to the business at hand. Hera was— “Almost four centimeters, and that’s a good strong contraction.” 

She groaned.

“Maybe three and a half.”

“How long is this going to take?”

“Hera.” The midwife sat down next to her. Dr. Benu, Hera reminded herself. Her name is Dr. Benu and she’s on your side, so be a little nicer. “I’ve read your file. I think it’s time to admit that your body might not have made the hormones to get a Twi’lek labor going.”

“So...what do we do?”

“I’m going to give you something to speed labor along.” 

“Sounds good.” Anything to get this over with.

“The downside is that it will speed labor along.”

Hera blinked at her for a moment before she understood. “You mean pain.”

“There’s nothing wrong with getting a nerve blocker.”

No, she wasn’t too proud to do something about the pain. She just disliked the idea of losing the use of her legs for a while. Just in case. “Maybe,” she said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

Chopper whined at her—organics' pain was dysfunctional and served no purpose. More to the point, Hera thought, he was uncomfortable watching it unless he was the one causing it. “You worry too much,” she told him.

“Okay.” Dr. Benu patted her arm, then injected something into the med monitor at her wrist. “It shouldn’t take more than three minutes for that to kick in, but we may still have a while to go after that. I’ll be back soon.”

“I love how ‘this is going to hurt in three minutes’ is so precise but ‘I’ll be back soon’ is so open-ended,” Sabine observed once Dr. Benu left.

“Doesn’t matter to me. I’m stuck here either way.”

Chopper wanted her to hurry up and finish. This was boring, and he needed to recharge his power cells. 

“Your life is hard,” Hera told him.

Then the next contraction started, and… “Oh, this one is definitely going to be worse,” she warned them. The pain went up, then up more, far past the point she could grit her teeth and endure, and then still worse— “Oh, FORCE, holy fuck, kriffing fuck that hurts!” she shouted. And it lasted. And lasted. Long enough for her to exhaust three languages worth of profanity, ending on, “Karabast!” as her body finally started to relax. 

“Karabast?” Sabine asked skeptically, but her eyes were worried.

“That was awful.”

“I’ll get the doctor.” 

“Wait, don’t go!” She gripped Sabine’s hand because—how was this possible?—another contraction was beginning, this one so bad she could do nothing except lie flat on her back and yell.

“Chop, go get the doctor,” Sabine said, but most of the personnel here didn’t understand binary and probably wouldn’t come when a droid called. Sabine waited until the pain began to taper off, then told her, “I’ll be right back. I’ll hurry.”

She rubbed Chopper’s dome compulsively, rocking a little. Relax, he ordered, but she only laughed at him bitterly.

Sabine and Dr. Benu returned mid-scream, the midwife turning heel as soon as she’d walked through the door. “I’ll get the anesthesiologist droid,” she said. “He has to prepare, though. It may take a good half hour.” 

Hera wasn’t crying. She wasn’t. Women did this every day, and she was definitely tough enough not to cry about it.

“Hurry,” Sabine said. She took Hera’s hand and braced her arm on her own. “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll get something for the pain.”

The contraction eased. “This is worse than torture,” Hera managed. The next one started, and she had not known there could be such pain in the world. Chopper was somewhere at her side. Sabine hovered over her, eyes worried. She rocked back and forth, desperate to do anything, but the pain had her in a vice grip and she couldn’t get free. The edges of her vision went red.

“I’m going to throw up next time,” she said, and Sabine told her, “Go ahead. It’s all right.” She threw up all over the coverlet, though she’d had nothing but ice chips for the past day. Small blessings. 

Objectively, she knew it couldn’t have been fifteen minutes since Dr. Benu sent for the droid. It felt like an eternity. “It’s okay,” Sabine kept telling her. “They’re getting help. It’s going to be okay.” Chopper chirruped anxiously, but she couldn’t turn her head enough to see him. Every pain was worse than the last. She looked around the room wildly for escape, but there was none.

Then Dr. Benu came back—not the droid. She took one look at Hera and lost no time in checking her. “You’re at seven centimeters already, and your water finally broke. You’re going fast. That’s got to hurt like sith.” She removed the dirty coverlet that they hadn’t had time to address and began washing her hands. 

“How much longer?” Hera asked. 

“Not long.”

She’d meant, “how much longer until the anesthesiologist droid comes,” but she was beginning to suspect Dr. Benu had something else in mind.

She threw up again. Sabine skated Kanan’s sweater gently over her face and a great wave of grief and loss went through her. It smelled like him. _Kanan, if you were here I wouldn’t need the drugs_ , she thought. _You’d hold me and you’d do that thing with the Force, and it wouldn’t hurt anymore._ That was profoundly wishful thinking, but she couldn’t help it just now. _Kanan, where are you? Please._

“Do you feel like pushing?” the midwife asked from somewhere nearby. 

“No.” But the next moment she WAS pushing, her body arching and shoving everything downwards without her permission.

“Good. Keep going.”

It felt like being ripped apart from the inside and she yelled, but it was such a relief—SUCH a relief—to have things moving after those awful contractions. Chopper leaned against her arm and rumbled soothingly. Or maybe he’d been doing it the whole time and she’d only just now noticed.

Now Sabine had let go of her hand and was down by her knees. “Oh good Force, Hera, I can see him!”

“This should go fast.”

She pushed again. A sensation of movement. “He’s green!” Sabine told her. 

“So am I,” she responded.

“No, but this is—DARK green, like— Huh, this is fascinating.”

“I swear to every god, if you paint this—”

Sabine grinned, an evil thing. 

She took a deep breath and pushed with all her might, and the pressure was unbearable; something was going to split for sure. Then the pain eased and the midwife said, “One more.” Sabine’s hands were cupped over her own mouth. Hera pushed again. It was easy this time. “That’s it,” Dr. Benu told her. “We’ve got him.” Chopper warbled impatiently. Sabine was crying. Hera was crying, but mostly laughing in relief. Thank you, thank you, it was finally over.

Then Sabine was sobbing, and she couldn’t see what the midwife was doing. “Is he okay?”

A shrill, thoroughly irritated cry filled the room. “He’s perfect.”

They put that crying, slimy, alive little thing on her chest, and Hera stroked his back with her hand as he calmed. “He sounds like you,” she told Chopper.

He should be so lucky, Chopper responded.

It was Dr. Benu who placed Kanan’s shirt over him.

Hera smiled at Sabine and told her, “You’re a wreck. Come look at him.” She barely noticed the doctor and the droid—NOW there was a droid—working down at her other end.

He’s...peach!” Sabine observed. “Peach, and green at the tips. And that hair!” 

“He looks human,” Hera said in wonder. She cradled him gently and turned him over to get a good look at his face. “Hmm. He looks like my father.”

“He looks like _Kanan_ ,” Sabine insisted.

“How can you tell?”

The girl traced a finger over one delicate, feathered eyebrow. 

“Well, he certainly doesn’t have my eyebrows,” Hera acknowledged.

“Look at his little hands—”

Chopper pronounced him satisfactory, but he was rocking side to side and his arms were in the air. Hera leaned over and bumped her forehead against his dome gently. “Thanks, Chop.”  

The movement had jostled the baby, and with a displeased little yowl, he opened his eyes. 

He opened his eyes. “Oh, Force.” Sabine started crying again.

She was looking right into Kanan’s eyes.

“There you are,” she told him gently.

A few minutes later the midwife took him and Hera closed her eyes to rest while they cut the cord, measured him, checked him over thoroughly, and pronounced him “healthy as a lothwolf,” which was apparently a saying around here. Sabine watched over the whole thing.

It wasn’t until they’d brought him to her to feed, yowling angrily again, that Sabine asked “Hera, what’s his name?”

“Jacen.”

“That’s— that’s not a Twi’lek name, is it?” 

“It IS, actually, an antiquated Twi’lek name, but nobody will recognize it. I got it from these old spacer myths—”

“—Wait a minute.” Sabine’s face cleared. “You mean those stories you used to read as a kid? The ones with the Old Republic Jedi Knights?” 

“Yes, those.”

“Hera, Kanan used to make fun of those stories!” 

“Well, he doesn’t have to use the name, so I don’t see why he gets a say in it.”

When they did, finally, help her figure out how to feed the baby, Sabine took off. “I have something to do,” she told Hera with a touch to her shoulder. “It won’t take too long.” 

“Yeah, I think you’ve seen enough for today anyway.”

“I’ll find Zeb on my way out. Bet you ten credits he fell asleep.”

Hera waved her out, tried to figure out what in the galaxy she was doing, and when she finally got the baby to latch on, went back to her examination of his face. (“The baby.” Her son. Jacen.) Everything where it should be—a tiny nose, two tightly buttoned eyes, the little pink mouth open and suckling sleepily. He was so tiny, and so absurdly REAL. She felt a sudden urge to keep him to herself, just her and the crew, away from the rest of the world.

Zeb opened the door quietly. “Hey, I can’t believe I missed it. How is he?”

Hera looked up and something about her expression stopped him in his tracks. “Will you do something for me?”

“Whatever you need. Are you all right?”

“Yes. The midwife. Go and find her. Don’t intimidate her; she’s a good person and I already put her through more than she deserves. But… She knows who we are. Ask her not to talk to the news outlets, okay? The last thing we need is his face as a headline tomorrow.” 

“If you want me to, but—”

“And I was thinking,” she interrupted. This part was going to hurt. “I might not...name Kanan as his father on the official documents.”

“What?! Why would you do that?”

“Names are easy to search.”

Zeb caught on and his face dropped into that scary, protective mode. Poor Dr. Benu. “I got it. You don’t want some Imperial data pusher finding out that Kanan Jarrus, Jedi Knight, has a son.”

She nodded.

“I’ll go talk to the midwife.”

“Don’t scare her!” 

Chopper blatted an addendum.

“You make any more cracks about my face, I’m going to rearrange yours,” Zeb told him. Then he left to do what she’d asked without even seeing Jacen. She had good friends.

Chopper beeped a quiet inquiry. 

“Hmm? Yeah, go recharge. We’ll be fine.”

She hadn’t slept herself in over two days, and with the adrenaline wearing off she was beginning to feel it. She could probably drift off sitting up like this. Jace was breathing deeply now, sound asleep. If she eased him into the tiny crib carefully, he wouldn’t wake up… 

Hera was contemplating this strategy when the first canon blast hit. Next thing she knew she was on her feet next to the bed with no memory of having jumped up. No, no, why did they have to pick tonight to attack, when she’d kept Sabine away from the defense perimeter? They should be concentrating on Yavin.

All right. They’d be all right. Sabine wasn’t the only one defending the city. She watched the sky, waiting for the gleam of the city’s shield, but it never activated.

Instead, she saw the next set of shells before they exploded, shooting up from...the ground? Somewhere nearby. An insurgent attack?

Then they exploded high above the city and she understood. Golds and blues and pinks and purples, oranges and true reds, filling the entire sky. But mostly greens. The show went on and on, fireworks on top of each other, the grandest display ever seen on Lothal. Beneath her, people emerged from their houses. Their voices drifted up to her, at first the same panicked shouts, then awed murmuring. 

“Look, baby,” Hera told Jacen. “Auntie Bine got you a present.” Jacen snored through the whole thing.

Afterwards, the people of Lothal told themselves that the fireworks show had marked the destruction of the Death Star, but that wouldn’t happen for another thirty minutes. Hera knew who it was for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: GET THE EPIDURAL DON’T LISTEN TO HERA SHE’S NEVER HAD A BABY BEFORE THIS ONE AND SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT SHE’S DOING JUST GET THE EPIDURAL. 
> 
> And on the same note, haha Hera thinks she's going to be combat ready in under two months.


	11. Native

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was spring in the northern hemisphere, cascades of purple flowers draping from the trees and a cool breeze against her face and lekku. Strapped to her chest, Jacen slept, lulled by the wind and the walking. Then she was happy in spite of herself, happy just to be in a world that was still alive and getting better.

The next two months lasted four months. Or at least they felt like they did. Part of it was the steep learning curve of keeping this tiny, needy thing alive, part of it the fugue from lack of sleep. Mostly it was the fact that she practically never slept in longer than two-hour snatches, so when she stopped to add up her awake time...two months really was more like four months.

“Stay on Lothal,” Rebel Command told her. “Moving bases is mundane. We can do it without the Ghost.” And Hera, who had thought she’d feel guilty about any time away from her post, took the leave and ran with it. 

Everybody helped with baby duty. Ketsu, unexpectedly, had the best luck — maybe because she was the only one who didn’t worry about what would happen if Jacen never stopped crying. She just put him on her shoulder and walked and bounced and went on watching her show, one earpiece in place. “She’s frosty,” Sabine said in admiration, but Hera found little overlap between battle skills and baby skills.

Mostly Hera got up with him when he cried, though. There was no point waking someone else to change his diaper when she was just going to have to feed him afterwards. And even from another room his cries made her milk let down. She was raw with lack of sleep and she cried every time he nursed, muffling the sobs and missing Kanan, missing Ezra.

Jacen was a tiny, wild creature during those first few weeks. When she held him in the small hours, limbs scrunched up against her body and eyes buttoned tight, he seemed more like some kind of cub than a person. She ran her hand over his downy hair and said, “It’s okay, good boy. The world won’t always be so strange.” She kissed the little legs that were quickly becoming pudgy. She tried to remember lullabies from her childhood, but drew a blank and had to resort to singing some of Kanan’s drinking songs, instead: “No wind that blew dismayed the crew nor troubled the captain’s mind.” He’d sung it to her every time she’d been grounded with a bad injury or a stomach virus. 

Those weeks were hard and boring, but normal in a way she’d never experienced before. They cooked and cleaned and said “oh Force, how is he awake again?” They repaired things and went to the market. She caught up on mission reports and read everything Rebel Command sent her. Nobody planned missions and nobody shot at them. It was just her and her family, going about life and watching too many shows on the holonet.

Hera walked to the market every day so she could see the sunlight and get out of the house. It was spring in the northern hemisphere, cascades of purple flowers draping from the trees and a cool breeze against her face and lekku. Strapped to her chest, Jacen slept, lulled by the wind and the walking. Then she was happy in spite of herself, happy just to be in a world that was still alive and getting better. Soon it would be summer and the Lothali children would be out of school, twisting open the water mains when nobody was looking and playing in the flooded streets like feral lothcats. She didn’t know what came next and often she was so tired that the world around her seemed unreal, but each day she got to walk in the sunshine.

In the early evenings when he’d been fed and changed and soothed but still wouldn’t stop wailing, Hera strapped Jacen down and put him in a landspeeder. Outside the city she could pick up speed and race across Lothal’s grasslands. And as long as she kept moving, he would calm and sleep. 

Except for one night. Hera was so tired that she tried to cheat the system and just walk him around the house instead of driving him. Jacen was having none of it. By the time she admitted defeat and put him in the landspeeder he was worked up into full freak-out mode. He’d calmed by the time they hit the city gates, but then he just sat there blowing bubbles to himself and chewing on his fists, eyes wide open.

“Please go to sleep,” she begged. “Come on, aren’t you even a little bit tired?”

He was not, so she kept driving.

The first howl came from far away. Hera saw the creature climb to the top of a distant hill and raise its head towards the full moon. Lothwolf. Beautiful. 

The second came disturbingly nearby. The third just to starboard. And then one appeared in front of her, coming into being where nothing had been before, and she was forced to jam on the breaks.

It’s okay, she thought. These are friends. 

Two more stalked up on either side of the speeder. They were HUGE friends.

His own personal amusement park ride paused, Jacen started wailing again. One of the wolves nosed towards him. No, no, he was too little and that was TOO close. Hera scrambled to unbuckle him and pick him up. But then the wolves nosed at her, too. Did they think he was some hurt baby animal who needed protecting from her?

“Hush, you big boy,” she soothed. It’s okay, she told herself again. You rode on one of these things. But that was when Ezra had been around to talk to them, and she didn’t exactly have his way with animals.

One of the wolves picked her up by the nape of her shirt and deposited her gently on her feet outside the speeder. Okay, they weren’t behaving like wild creatures. Two more showed up right behind her and she didn’t know it until one of them nudged her in the back. She must have jumped a half meter in the air, but she stood her ground. Jacen stopped wailing and sneezed, then observed in wide-eyed fascination, though the wolves must have been beyond his range of focus.

Then the first one, the wolf that had stopped her speeder, opened its mouth. She put a protective hand over Jacen’s head as those teeth loomed nearer. But it only extended its tongue, bigger than the whole baby, and...licked him? And her entire arm, too — eew. The next one nudged in and licked them as well. And then there was a whole pack, covering them in wolf slobber, breath heavy and warm all around her but not threatening. They were...grooming Jacen, or marking him. It didn’t seem to hurt him, at any rate. 

Once each of the wolves had gotten its turn that wail went up from a distant hill again. They turned their heads towards it and loped off without so much as another look at her. 

Well, that had been...the second-most bizarre experience she could recall. Jacen, thoroughly slimy and pacified, nuzzled for her breast. “NOW you’re happy?” she asked him.

 

...

 

When Jacen was eight weeks old he got his second and last set of inoculations. He ran a mild fever and screamed all night and they all stayed up fretting while Chopper beeped in annoyance: Within expected parameters!!! What was wrong with them, had they all forgotten how to measure temperature? Two days later Rebel Command let her know that they were settled into the new base and ready to begin regular missions again, the message clear. Hera still hadn’t gotten more than a half-night’s sleep since Scarif, her body was far from combat-ready, and Jace wanted to nurse every three hours. But the break was over.

“We’re not really taking this little thing back to base?” Zeb asked. 

“He stays with me,” Hera told him.

“That was a great plan when we thought we were taking him to YAVIN, but this is Hoth... “ 

“The Ghost is heated.”

“You can’t keep him in the Ghost all the time.” 

“He stays with me,” Hera repeated every time somebody protested. And that was that.

That evening she found Sabine staring too intently at the xisor chard instead of chopping it. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t go with you.”

She’d known that was a possibility. Hoth was so remote, and Sabine had duties elsewhere, too. 

“It’s not just Lothal,” Sabine told her. “It’s the Mandalorian rebellion and Concord Dawn, and Ketsu won’t join in on a military operation THAT totally, and I need to be...not hiding. Not that you’re hiding. But — ”

“You’re tied to the rest of the galaxy now. I know. That’s not a bad thing.”  

“It’s not.” Sabine sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

“We won’t just sit on base all the time. We’ll still run missions and leave the planet. You’ll probably see us again in a few months. That’s not very long.”

“I know, but it’s long in baby time!”

Oh, that was it. Jacen had been almost like Sabine’s own child since the moment he’d been born, and to leave that —  Yeah, that was going to hurt. “We’ll comm every night,” she said. “He won’t forget you.”

“Who’s going to watch him when you’re out on a mission?”

“Zeb or Rex or Chopper. We’ll trade off. It’s a series of caves surrounded by solid rock on all sides, Sabine. He’ll be safe.”

Sabine nodded, unresigned, and they made their last dinner on Lothal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been told time and again not to put real songs in my stories. It ruins the verisimilitude. This is good advice. I cannot seem to take it. Anyway, "Walloping Window Blind" is a great song for the Ghost crew.
> 
> Also, in canon they apparently don't establish Echo Base on Hoth until a while after this point, but shh!


	12. Training

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Now who’s going to fly against me today?”  
> A few seconds’ murmuring and then Wedge cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled from the back of the room, “Luke!”  
> “Yeah,” shouted one of the other kids. “Luke!”  
> And then she was subjected to a chorus of “Luke! Luke! Luke!” until somebody shoved the poor kid forward and he stumbled towards the podium, red-faced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has come to my attention that Echo Base on Hoth is not actually established for at least a year. Just roll with it, okay?

For five minutes after their arrival at Echo Base, it seemed that Hera was a celebrity. Then it became clear that Jacen was the celebrity and she merely the boring adult who happened to have him strapped to her chest. He was literally the only baby on the entire planet, and she couldn’t walk across the hangar without somebody stopping to coo at him or asking where he was.

She jumped back into work and ran on adrenaline, briefings and planning meetings all day, up with Jace half the night. At least it was only half the night now, though. For the first few weeks (until he got interested in the world and refused to hold still ever again) she could work with him strapped to her chest, retire to one of the nearby ships to feed and change him, then jump right back into work again. 

She hit the weights for forty-five minutes every evening, and the experience was...well, beyond humbling. Mortifying. Her core muscles hadn’t been so weak since she WAS a baby, she was fairly certain that her organs hadn’t quite settled into their proper places yet, and she didn’t want to think about the various fluids leaking out of her body. Hand-to-hand combat would have to wait for a while.

Pilot training, on the other hand, they were all too happy to hand over to her. Her first day back she walked into the briefing room with Jace strapped to her chest and was greeted by a chorus of “awws” that did not sound like they’d come from the 17- to 25-year-olds in front of her. “All right, all right, find a seat,” she said. Then she turned and almost ran into a grinning, waiting face. Arryn—that kid had survived the Battle of Yavin, thank you Force.

He was all sweetness and light. “Welcome back, General Syndulla. And may I say that your figure has come back nicely.”

“Thank you, Arryn. That’s wildly inappropriate. Why don’t you take inventory duty for the next two days.”

He shrugged—worth it, that gesture meant—and handed her a data chip. 

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Well… We don’t really know what kind of shit babies need. But we’re really glad you’re back and happy for you and all of that, and none of US has ever managed to have a kid, so, like, congratulations.”

“Arryn, what did you do?”

“Nah, Mart did it. He took up a collection, like a present.”

She took the data chip from him. No tearing up, Hera. You still have to conduct a briefing while seeming vaguely like a combat pilot. “Thank you. This means a lot.” 

Later she would read it and discover that it WAS a lot—kind of an insane amount considering that the Rebellion didn’t really pay them much beyond necessities. But right then she just pulled herself together and rapped on the podium. “All right, people. I’m starting whether you’re ready or not.” Introductions, duty roster, news briefings, and a new technique to try in high atmosphere. “Any questions before we hit the simulators?”

Hands raised. Somebody called: “General, can we see your baby?” All the other hands went down. 

She peeked at Jace. He was still asleep but starting to fuss the way he did when he was about to wake up and need a diaper change. “Tell you what. If half of you run at least 14,000 on the sims, THEN you can see the baby.”

A tremendous collective whine went up. 

“Guys, he’s just a face in a snowsuit right now.”

“Pleeeeease?”

“Not until he wakes up. After the simulators. Now who’s going to fly against me today?” 

A few seconds’ murmuring and then Wedge cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled from the back of the room, “Luke!”

“Yeah,” shouted one of the other kids. “Luke!”

And then she was subjected to a chorus of “Luke! Luke! Luke!” until somebody shoved the poor kid forward and he stumbled towards the podium, red-faced. Luke Skywalker, the hero of Yavin. He didn’t look like much—a little on the short side, shaggy-haired in that easy-to-cut Outer Rim style. Maybe about Ezra’s age. Oh, yeah. She was going to like this kid.

“Luke Skywalker, you don’t have to listen to these bullies. Do you _want_ to fly the dogfight sequence with me?”

“Yes sir!” He realized that sounded a little too eager and made an attempt at decorum. “I mean, I think I’m ready, sir.”

She handed barely-still-sleeping Jacen off to Mart. (“What do I do with him?!” “Don’t drop him.”) Then she strapped into the flight simulator and dialed up an X-wing. Luke was already there waiting for her. “Do you have a preference for location?” she asked him.

“How about the Zelta II junkyards?”

“Sounds like a blast.”

Hera realized during the takeoff sequence that she was going to be at a disadvantage. She’d underestimated how much she depended upon basic core strength for flying, and when she went into her first roll, it became clear that G Forces in an X-wing were enough to pull the milk right out of her. Great. 

Still, she had skill and experience on her side. And she might as well see what the kid could do before blowing him out of the sky. She turned to face him, dueling-style. He hadn’t expected the move, and he let her chase him into to a cluster of scrap metal.  She fired at a rusted ship right next to him and caught him with the shrapnel, and his shields dropped by twenty percent. “Warning shot.”

But then that crazy kid went INTO the thickest part of the junk, and she had no alternative but to follow him. They’d both get smashed to pieces. He pulled a fast one on her and forced her into some debris to avoid his shot, and then their shields were even. 

He was GOOD. Really good. He wasn’t just fast, he was...before. He did everything two seconds before it made any sense to do it. Hera recognized that type of flying. Where had she seen this?

Okay, time to stop taking it easy on him. She found a decrepit cruiser and played here-we-go-round-the-rock with him, twisting just before he got to her and coming in for a high-side pass that she technically shouldn’t have tried outside of atmosphere. There! She strafed his fighter and his shields went down.

He flipped his X-wing and charged her. What did he think he was doing? 

She shot at him and she MISSED him—he’d known where to move before she’d even fired. Then she had the sense to run and they were chasing each other top speed through the debris.

He was good but inconsistent, relying on instinct and raw talent rather than years of training. She played the long game, yoyoing around to cut him off again and again. As long as she didn’t do something stupid, she would get him eventually. He knew it, too, and that drove him into wild, reckless flying. Luke, she thought. Take a deep breath and center yourself.

Instead, he zagged upwards on her next yoyo, increasing speed to ram her. What was he doing? They would both be killed! She pulled starboard and then she saw—he’d expected her to flee. The shot hit the edge of an s foil and rocked her fighter. Shields at 30 percent. This kid had beaten _her_ at a game of chicken.

All right, it was time to get fancy. Hera locked her s foils and sped through an impossibly small opening in the middle of the cruiser. He’d have to find a way around and she’d be waiting for him on the other side. But Luke had other ideas, and he charged through after her. 

Where had she seen this style of flying before? 

It came to her all at once. Vader. He flew just like Vader did.

She flipped her fighter and waited for him, but he came out of the cruiser at an angle and they ended up facing each other, point-blank, Luke’s shields down and hers at 30%. Both of them had lined up kill shots. 

She ended the simulation.

Hera emerged from the flight simulator to the roar of pilots cheering. Jacen was awake and making his displeasure known. Mart looked at her in a blind panic, so she laughed at him and took Jacen from him, bouncing him up and down as he continued to yowl angrily. “Luke Skywalker, you are the real thing!”

He looked genuinely embarrassed. “You would have had the higher score if we’d played it out.”

“We would both have been dead. Doesn’t matter whose score is higher at that point.”

He shrugged. “You had me. I’m not as good as you are.”   

“No,” she agreed. “But you’re going to be better.” 

“I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, I do. I’m going to train you.”

But she never did train him. At the end of the month Jacen caught his first cold, the sound of his rattling cough sending her into panic. She held him all night and listened to his breathing. After two days of that she’d made her decision—Hoth was no place for a baby and it was selfish, not brave, of her to keep him here. 

This was exactly why she’d feared having a child. Jacen wasn’t a sweet domestic fantasy, he was a person, a person whose heart would break every time his mother flew away and proved that she cared more about the rest of the galaxy than she did about him. Before she’d had him, Hera had known herself completely. No room for anybody tiny and helpless. She would never stop fighting, never back down. She was lucky, so lucky, to have the opportunity to make things better.

She had been an idiot with no concept of reality.

Her pilots were at Hoth, new intel came to Hoth, special ops launched out of Hoth. At the end of that week she requested a transfer to another Rebel base, any other base. Their relief palpable, Rieekan and the others assigned her to Primtara Outpost. She never regretted the move.


	13. Captive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She still carried the loss of Kanan and Ezra—it wouldn’t crush her, but it weighed her down so that her heart was a heavy thing she dragged along behind her.  
> But they functioned. They all functioned. Always on separate missions now so that Jacen was left with one of his primary caretakers in the event anything went wrong.  
> Just before his first birthday, something went wrong.

Primtara Outpost wasn’t a bad location for a child, but it also wasn’t much of a military operation. Yet. She joined Admiral Ackbar, the ranking official on base and already a well-known tactician. “Wait—” she’d said upon meeting him. “They left you these ships? Why don’t you have all of the Mon Cal cruisers?”

He had waved his hand and replied, “I don’t need them. Here we can make anything work,” and they were good friends ever afterwards. They conducted small-scale raids of shipyards and began to cobble together another fleet. Okay, “fleet” was a little ambitious, but they made a start, at least.

And Hera trained a new set of pilots, another group of kids who knew how to get up in the air and land, but not much more. The Phoenix Squadron designation came with her, and within six months she had them in shape.

It was impossible, she realized, to be a good mother and a good general and still have time to sleep. She learned to live with mediocrity when the situation wasn’t life-threatening. And that experience was...good for her. She discovered weaknesses she didn’t know were weaknesses—a refusal to back down, a penchant for thinking that everybody else could perform at the same level she could. So she kicked herself and made cautious plans that would have 25-year-old Hera grinding her teeth, and she kept her people alive for long enough for them to become excellent. Her squadron was better than ever because she concentrated on being a leader instead of a pilot.

Her team moved to Primtara with her—Chopper, Zeb, now Rex. The Rebellion had always been good about stationing friends together. It was the least they could do, considering they hardly had the means to offer a living salary or retirement benefits. Alexsandr Kallus came too, which was a little surprising. She hadn’t realized he and Zeb were so close. When they’d talked about the move, Hera had offered him Sabine’s old cabin and Zeb had sniggered. Kallus used the bunk for storage space, but as far as she could tell he and Zeb shared a room. Hmm. Those beds hadn’t been quite large enough even for Kanan and her… Buuuut that was quickly approaching an area classified as none-of-her-business.

And Jacen grew. He grew and he figured out how to get into things. By six months, he had developed a fascination with bugs that unfortunately extended to putting them into his mouth. And he had started crawling. After work they got down on all fours and chased him around the Ghost, Hera and Zeb growling ferociously as they cornered him, Jacen laughing like a mad little thing. Then Rex would scoop him up for a counter-attack that involved way too much upside down time for right after dinner and they would retreat, felled. 

She was busy and interested in her work, and in each individual moment she was happy. She stepped back from the situation and watched them all laugh at each other and said: This is a good life. I am happy. And it was true. But at the end of the day when Jacen had finally fallen asleep, she added up the moments of her life and felt...what? Discontent. Half of her family missing from each day. What comes next? she thought. Is this it? She still carried the loss of Kanan and Ezra—it wouldn’t crush her, but it weighed her down so that her heart was a heavy thing she dragged along behind her.

But they functioned. They all functioned. Always on separate missions now so that Jacen was left with one of his primary caretakers in the event anything went wrong.

Just before his first birthday, something went wrong.

She’d been running training exercises on the tiny Corvin Outpost, teaching on-the-fly infiltration techniques. She stepped into the forest, blending in and waiting to see how her group would do.

The ambush came from behind, arms around hers, her legs kicking in the air. Her body reacted before her brain had even considered that this might be a prank. Good thing, too—a twist, a quick elbow to the gut and a kick between the legs and she had taken the first one down. The second had a fast-acting sedative, and she didn’t even see who they were before she lost consciousness.

By the time she woke they had her on a small transport ship, her hands cuffed. Bounty hunters. Two of them and a droid, and maybe one more somewhere else. Well this was...bad. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at the rank patch on her left arm. It was a good bet they knew who she was.  

The irony of being captured by bounty hunters on a Rebel base during an infiltration exercise was not lost on her. She didn’t find it very funny.

The human nudged the other one, a man in knock-off Mandalorian armor, and gestured towards her. Great. “General Syndulla.” Fake Mando crouched at her side. “Awake, I see. Do you have any idea the price on your head?” 

Yeah, twelve thousand credits, she thought. Once she would have spit in his face, or gone the complete other direction and pretended to be frightened until she could escape. Now, she was so resentful and so contemptuous of them that the best she could manage was to keep her mouth shut.

Fake Mando left the question hanging between them for a long minute, but surprisingly, he didn’t get angry when she refused to answer it. “Well,” he said. “It’s not my job to make you talk.”

She couldn’t do anything while they were in the air—at least not unless she could take them all out, and she couldn’t do that with her hands cuffed. She closed her eyes and actually managed to rest while they flew.

They didn’t touch her, to their credit. Didn’t hit her, didn’t undress her, didn’t bother to so much as leer. She began to think she might get out of this unscathed… until she heard the human arranging a hand-off with the Empire immediately upon landing. That was also bad. They gave her a name, though—Cygna. They were taking her to Cygna.

It wasn’t fair. Corvin Outpost had been a simple training exercise. It was supposed to be safe.

She saved her strength and tried to convince herself that everything would be okay. The chain of Jacen’s guardians was clear and lengthy—she’d had the paperwork finalized before he was even born. Zeb and Sabine with joint custody, then her friend Sharra, then Rex. Eventually her own family on Ryloth, though she wasn’t exactly eager for that to happen. It was more or less what she’d written in her will for Chopper, because an ownerless droid would also become prey in short order. But Jacen had already lost one parent before he was even born, and she had no intention of making him an orphan. No way.

She’d never heard of Cygna before, and she didn’t get much of a view when they landed. Just a platform in the trees, river and forest below, before the droid prodded her in front of him onto a gangplank that led straight to an Imperial shuttle. Two elite troopers stood ready, electric prods before them. She took one look at those prods and thought, _There are no Jedi to save you this time_ . Then she thought, _No, we’re not doing this_ , and threw herself sideways over the railing into the waiting river fifteen meters below.

The water hit her like a speeder wreck, then the current drug her under before she could process how cold it was. The world was dark and muddy, everything was dark. She kicked hard towards what she thought was the surface. 

By the time her head broke the water red and white lights had formed around the corners of her vision. She took a ragged breath—no sign of the ships or of people. Maybe they’d think she’d drowned.

The current pulled her back under and out towards the middle of the river. Then again, she might actually drown. 

Hera kicked with all her might and got her head above water, but her arms, cuffed in front of her, were ineffectual. She made it halfway to the edge and before she went under again. And again, the pull rough enough to let her know that the river was not joking. She was finally saved through no effort of her own, when the branch of a tree that had fallen across the river caught her shirt. She waited there, panting and freezing, until her breath returned. Then she tossed both arms and a leg over the tree and climbed out.

A wide swath of land by the river showed signs of having been cleared by sentient hands. She followed the work until she came to a small bunker, landing platform in front of it, with—oh, this had to be a trap—a small shuttle. She couldn’t get to it without walking across the open platform.

Well, sooner was better than later. She went quickly and cautiously—nothing. The shuttle showed no signs of booby traps, but there was a keypad with an alarm system, of course.

A Corellian G45 alarm system. Oh, Sabine, you’ve saved my life, she thought. She slipped the sturdy file out of its casing in her boot, pried off the bottom corner of the panel without loosening the other sides, and used the file to ease the wire packet out. Then she disconnected the green wire. And boom. She was in. Thank the Force for shoddy, recalled alarm systems.

Hotwiring a ship she could do without instruction. She’d have to figure out some way to pay for the shuttle she was stealing, of course…

That idea went mid-thought when she caught sight of the illegally modified proton rifle slung over the back of the copilot’s seat. Bounty hunters. This was their base, or one of them anyway, and they’d been stupid enough to arrange a hand-off on their home territory. And then they’d all left, probably to look for her. Well, if that wasn’t the luck of the Force plus a new level of incompetence, she’d never gotten lucky before.

She left before her luck could turn. Once she’d made it out of the solar system she called up a map and flew the shuttle to Kalinda dripping wet with her hands cuffed in front of her. When she got there she called Command for a pick-up, then used another of Sabine’s tricks and downloaded a worm that would infect anything they plugged into the ship’s data systems—just out of spite. They probably had a homing beacon on this thing.

Her ride took her back to Hoth for the usual post-getting-yourself-captured debriefing, and by the time she’d finished that Jacen’s first birthday was only a day away and Hera could hardly wait to get back to Primtara.

She stopped by the mess to get some sandwiches for the trip, and there she ran into an old acquaintance.

Well, they didn’t exactly “run into” each other. Hera had spotted Leia Organa on her way into the cafeteria. The princess stuck out like a sore thumb, sitting alone with a datapad in her hand, pretending to read it and pretending to eat her soup. Everything about her looked rigid and off—a show of normalcy thinly layered over some great hurt. 

Hera and Leia had crossed paths several times on Hoth, already. The princess liked to sit in the back of the room and take notes when Hera was lecturing her pilots. She regularly panicked the poor tauntauns, trying to ride them through sheer force of will. And her voice over the intercom meant trouble. Princess Leia was driven—a driven, 20-something woman who wouldn’t let anything stand in her way. She reminded Hera of Sabine, or...well, a younger version of herself.

How had she talked casually to Leia Organa and not recognized what was so painfully obvious even from across the room, that the teenager she’d known had broken and then healed wrong?

Hera loaded up on sandwiches and a cup of caf as she thought it out. Leia was Alderaanian, of course. This year she’d lost...everything.

This year. Tomorrow was Jacen’s birthday. Alderaan had been destroyed one year ago today. How could that have slipped her mind? She looked around the mess and now she caught sight of the banners, green and blue and white, royal colors: “Remember Alderaan. Its light still shines in us.” 

What idiots had left Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan to eat her lunch alone today, of all days? Were they really too afraid to talk to her?

“Do you mind if I sit here? It’s a bit crowded.”

Leia looked up as Hera slid into the seat opposite her, her face none too welcoming, but at least she didn’t mention Hera’s obvious lie.

“Actually, I wanted to thank you,” Hera began. “I should have done it before, but things got… crazy.”

“Thank me?”

“For the cruisers you brought us.” 

“Cruisers?”

“A few years ago, on Lothal.”

She watched Leia search her memory until it clicked. “Oh. My father did that. I was just the errand girl.” 

“I don’t know about that. I remember somebody shooting stormtroopers and then making a pretty good show of the snotty princess act.”

That got her an almost-smile. “Yeah, that was fun.”

“I brought you some caf as a thank you.”

“That’s your caf.”

“No,” Hera insisted. “I got it for you.” She proffered it to Leia, who considered for a moment and then took it. Now, how far did she push the princess? She shouldn’t be alone, but there was real merit to walling off pain when things got too hard. Reminders of what Leia had lost might not be good for her. _So what are you going to do, Hera?_ she asked herself. _Walk away without trying, like everybody else?_

“You know, Bail Organa funneled us credits for years, but the cruisers were really next level assistance.”

Leia’s head came up sharply. “You knew my father personally?” she asked.

There we go. Don’t push too hard. “I worked with him, yes. Trusted him from the beginning. His was...a very great loss. Difficult to take.” She let herself think back to that moment when she’d realized—Bail, Bail is gone, too.

Leia said nothing, merely watched her, trying to judge what she was up to. Then she said, “It's difficult, of course, but he’s one man on a whole planet.”

“I don’t know about you, but I miss the people, not the planets,” Hera told her.

Leia shrugged, that blast door coming down over her eyes and closing her off again. Hera had stepped too far. “Yes. Well. Thank you for the caf.” The princess rose, putting data pad, soup, and mug on her tray and clearing it. “And thanks for your condolences.” She left.

Her droid, a blue and white R2 unit who had been crunching numbers on the dataport behind them, whistled a more sincere thank you.

“Hey,” Hera asked it. “Who does she have? Who are her friends?”

The R2 unit beeped out a name. Han Solo. Hera tried not to make a face—great pilot, not exactly fantastic with grieving girls. In fact...that combination kind of worried her. 

“Anyone else?”

Chewbacca she didn’t really know. Luke Skywalker… “Oh, good.” Luke would take care of her. Hera herself could hurt for Leia Organa from a distance, but today’s conversation had shown that she clearly wasn’t close enough to help.

She sent a message to Primtara—I’ll be there in twenty hours—logged in the hyperspace jump, and went to bed with a book. She’d gone into labor almost exactly a year ago, and this year she was planning to sleep as long as she wanted. 

Chopper and Zeb met her at the ramp when she landed. Zeb picked her up and hugged her, twirling her around before setting her down again.

“Hey,” Hera laughed, “this is quite the greeting party!” 

“They told us you were captured. We didn’t let on to Jace or anything, partly because we didn’t know…” 

“They...didn’t tell you when I escaped?”

“First message we got was from you, yesterday.”

“Oh. Guys. I’m so sorry.”

Chop blatted at her angrily.

“Well, I didn’t GET myself captured!”

He begged to differ.

“Well, I’m glad to see you too,” Hera told him, patting his dome. “Where’s Jace?”

“Rex is feeding him breakfast.”  

She pushed past them and beat a line to Rex’s quarters and there sat Jacen, all covered with meiloorun. “Hi, baby, did you miss me?” she asked. 

Mouth full, Jacen stuck his tongue out at her and laughed. She picked him up and squished her face against his cheek. Jace patted her lek with a comfortably sticky hand, her big boy, almost a toddler. “Home,” he insisted. They’d been coaching him: “Mama’s coming home. Say ‘Mama’s home.’”

“Yes, I’m home. Happy birthday.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had planned to base Hera’s capture off of the upcoming Doctor Aphra comic. It doesn’t come out until March 28, though, and I’m unwilling to wait. So here, have an alternate version.


	14. Parting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She and Rex watched the transmission in the common area with steadily sinking hearts. A second Death Star. It didn’t say the words, but the implication was clear. All pilots called to rendezvous 5.25 immediately. When it ended they sat in silence for a moment.  
> “Well,” Hera said. “I always wanted to fly that trench. Though… I don’t suppose there will be an exhaust port on this one.”  
> Rex laughed. Hera turned to cut the transmission...  
> ...and there stood Jacen, haunting the doorway in that preternaturally quiet way he had when he knew he shouldn’t be watching.  
> “Hey,” Hera smiled brightly at him. “How would you like to go visit Sabine for a while?”

Hera was engaged in an epic lightsaber battle for control of D’Qar’s landing strip when Rex found her. “Transmission.”

She bopped Jace hard with the foam lightsaber, but he held onto his own and squawked indignantly. “Hey!” He launched an attack, whapping her across the thighs from all angles while she swatted at his toy saber with her own, making a pretense of defending herself.  

“What kind of transmission?” she asked Rex.

“Priority, Command frequency.”

“All right, all right.”

Jace groaned in disappointment.

“Ten minutes,” she told him.

“No, ten YEARS!”

Hera rolled her eyes. “That’s right, I’m going to take ten years to watch a briefing.” She brought her lightsaber down hard on his and he dropped it.  

“Not fair!”

“Don’t let your guard down.”

He chased her back to the Ghost, yelling like a Wookie, and she caught him on the ramp and pretended to eat him up. “Ma-am! Mama!” Jacen squirmed. “I already burned you to death one million times with my lightsaber!”

Rex cleared his throat. 

“Right,” Hera said. “You need to make yourself scarce, Jace. You want to play vids while we work?”

He considered, then beat a line for the holo link in her quarters before she could change her mind. 

She and Rex watched the transmission in the common area with steadily sinking hearts.  A second Death Star. It didn’t say the words, but the implication was clear. All pilots called to rendezvous 5.25 immediately. When it ended they sat in silence for a moment.

“Well,” Hera said. “I always wanted to fly that trench. Though… I don’t suppose there will be an exhaust port on this one.”

Rex laughed. Hera turned to cut the transmission...

...and there stood Jacen, haunting the doorway in that preternaturally quiet way he had when he knew he shouldn’t be watching. 

“Hey,” Hera smiled brightly at him. “How would you like to go visit Sabine for a while?”

He considered. “Will you be there?”

“I’ll drop you off and stay for a day or two, but then I’ve got to go work.” 

“Well...I could go with you.”

“This is one of those not-for-four-year-olds things.”

“I’m almost five.”

“Not an almost-five-year-old thing, either.”

He frowned.

“So...you up for staying with Sabine for a while?”

“I guess so.”

 

…

 

Rex took the Phantom and flew straight to Sullust while Hera made the side trip to Lothal. Sabine had been on Mandalore the month before, which wouldn’t have worked for Jacen. They’d lucked out.

She let him sit in the copilot’s seat even before they went into hyperspace. He mostly looked at the starboard monitor in uncharacteristic silence. 

“Hey,” Hera told him. “I found you something before we left D’Qar.” She opened the pilot’s compartment with a sharp rap and rummaged in it. When her fingers found the bird’s nest she lifted it carefully. “Check this out.”  

“A nest?”

“Yeah, a nest and a little egg. The baby bird is okay—see? Here’s the hole where it pecked its way out.”

Jace took it from her with none of his usual fascination. He turned it over and pretended to examine it, but he was clearly stewing on something. “Mama?” he asked after a moment.

“Yeah?”

“Do you lie to me?”

Uh oh. “What do you mean?” 

“Do you say things that are lies?”

Hera considered carefully. This question was a minefield. “I try not to. I’ve probably told you a lie once or twice without meaning to, or without thinking about it. But I try to tell you the truth.”

Jace traced the bird’s egg as carefully as he could, still a little too hard. It cracked where the hole was. “Okay, tell me, then— Are you gonna die?”

She froze like a rycrit in headlights. “You mean...ever? Or now?” 

“I don’t want you to die.” He was looking down at the nest, but she could hear the moment when his voice crumpled into tears.

“Oh, baby, I’m not going to die,” she said without thinking.

“But EVERYBODY dies.” His shoulders shook.

“Hey— hey— come here.”

He climbed onto her lap and buried his face against her chest. Hera held him with one arm and tried to figure out what to say as she double-checked the hyperspace coordinates. “You want to help me?”

He nodded, sniffled, and helped, which consisted mostly of pushing the “set” button.

Did she tell the truth? _Yes, what I do is very dangerous._ Or: _Love, we’re never safe for sure, but Chopper and Rex will be there. Anyway, who do you think is going to beat ME?_ Or: _Some day I’ll die, but not for a long, long time._ None of these was a lie, exactly. But he would hear the way she hedged her bets, and they wouldn’t make him feel better. He’d sob the rest of the way to Lothal, then sob in terror when she left him there. And his worry wouldn’t help either of them.

Did she lie to him? _No, baby, I’m not going to die._ And then if she DID die? She knew that galaxy-ending feeling well, and if it caught him by surprise, if she died after promising not to, he would never trust the world again. _Nothing can keep me away from you._ That was better. Maybe if  he lost her he’d find some way to believe she was still with him. It was a cheat, though. If people could come back from the dead to watch over the living, Kanan would have done it.

He was too young to worry about this. He couldn’t understand any of the more nuanced answers, the ones that could bring comfort without being egregious lies.

“Put your finger over mine,” she said, and they punched the hyperspace ignition together and waited until the sequence had engaged.

What did she say? “You know what hyperspace is?” she asked finally.

He nodded. “It’s when you make the stars stringy so you can get far away really fast.”

“Yeah. You’ve got to figure out exactly where to go so that you don’t run into anything between you and your ending point. Sometimes you’ve got to cross the whole galaxy without hitting anything.” Well, a big chunk of it, anyway. 

“So it’s scary?”

“No. But it’s not safe.” Hera fumbled for words. If this didn’t land with him, he’d just be frightened of hyperspace from here on out. “But we don’t worry about it. Know why?”

He shrugged.

“Because Chop and I, we know what we’re doing.” 

He caught the connection but not the lesson. “But you can still die!”

“And you could die climbing those tall trees, but you aren’t scared, are you?”

Jacen shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I can just catch myself.”

“I know you can. I see you way up there and it scares me sometimes. But I trust you to catch yourself. And you trust Chopper to make the hyperspace jump. Do you trust me?”

He nodded. 

“Do you think I’m tough?”

He nodded again.

“So trust me when I say that I can keep myself safe and get back to you. Okay?”

He was only four, though, and metaphors about hyperspace and trees were frankly over his head, even if he understood what she was saying in the literal sense. Hera watched him take a deep breath and steel himself. Then he lied, because she needed him to. “Okay.”

 

…

 

Sabine was staying in Ezra’s tower. She met them out on the plain in front of it, catching Jace up in a hug. He hadn’t been to this particular location since… since he was a bundle of cells, Hera realized.

“Come on,” Sabine told him. “I’ll let you walk up the steps to the very top.” She probably didn’t realize that she would be carrying him when he tired out a third of the way up. Hera got the bags and followed them.

“Where’s Zeb?” Sabine asked. 

“Alexsandr got badly hurt last month. They’re on an extended leave, out of communications range. ...I think they went to Lira San.”

Sabine blinked at her. “That’s some serious stuff.” 

“It’s good. They should go and be happy before it’s t—” No. “—while they can,” she amended.

As soon as they cleared the top step Jacen made a beeline for the balcony, but Hera blocked the door. “Nope. That railing is taller than your head. I’ll go out with you later.”

“But I WANT to.”

She gave him the Look. He crossed his arms, clearly waiting for her to turn her back.

“Hey, buddy, why don’t you go check out the helmet collection in the closet,” Sabine suggested. “You can try them on.”

“WHAT helmet collection?”

She palmed the door open and a few fell out. “This helmet collection.” 

“Whoa.” Distracted, Jacen disappeared blissfully into the storage area.

“How long will you be away?” Sabine asked.

“I don’t know. Weeks? A few months, maybe, at worst.” 

“Mm.”

“If something comes up and you need me to get him… I’ll figure it out. Just comm.”

Sabine shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I told you, any time.”

“I’ll comm every day if I can. But don’t assume something’s wrong if you don’t hear from me.” 

Jacen emerged from the closet with a black TIE pilot’s helmet on his head. “Look! Hey, look at me! This one’s got tubes. It smells like stinky breath!”

“Take it off, then,” Hera told him.

He disappeared into the closet again, the better to ignore her advice, and called. “It smells like stinky toots!” 

“Jacen,” she warned.

“It smells like a butt helmet.”

“Hey, that’s enough!” A rustling sound told her that he’d moved on to the next helmet. Sabine was laughing next to her. “Oh yeah, you two are going to be great influences on each other.”

“He’ll keep me company. I won’t let him do anything that you wouldn’t do.”

“Did Ketsu take off for a while?” Hera asked.

Sabine snorted, her mood abruptly dark and bitter. “Yeah. She took off.”  

Uh oh. They were going to have to talk about that.

Later, though, because just then a tremendous crash came from the storage area. They both jumped for the doorway, tripping over each other and wading through the helmets rolling on the floor. Jacen looked at Sabine mildly, holding the edge of the long display shelf in his hand, and told her, “Your shelf fell down.” 

“Yeah, first thing we’re going to do is find you a jungle gym, kid.”

 

…

 

After he’d been put to bed, Jacen got up a record twelve times—first asking for water or needing to go to the fresher, then just trying to distract them with wandering, open-ended stories. Once he’d finally fallen asleep and the two of them had done dishes, though, Sabine brought out a Chandrilan cheesecake and they had time to sit peacefully. Hera would leave in a day or two, after Jacen had settled in. Tonight was the calm before the storm, but it didn’t feel that way—it just felt like calm.

“Wine?” Sabine asked, and Hera said, “Sure.”

That earned her a blank look. “Really?” Hera measured with her fingers—just a little bit. Sabine raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment and poured them both glasses. “Didn’t think you drank.”

“I don’t, but half a glass won’t do any harm.”

“Hera, I have literally never seen you drink, including when you were sitting in bars.”

She shrugged. “As a habit, I’m wary of it. And we didn’t keep anything on the ship because Kanan had a problem. And I had to be ready to make a fast getaway most of the time, anyway, so…”

“Wait, Kanan had a drinking problem? When did THAT happen?”

“Oh. Long before your time, I guess. When I met him. He had a few very drunken nights after that and I threw fits about them and it was...not good. Most of the time I knew him he wouldn’t touch the stuff, though. We kept it off of the ship to reduce temptation.”

Sabine shook her head. “I REALLY did not know that.” 

They took their dessert outside on the platform so as not to wake Jace, sitting on the floor with their backs against the tower. They’d left all the lights on inside, and between that and the moons it was a lovely place to sit and talk. The tower must look like a lighthouse, all alone out there on the dark plain.  

“What’s the story with Ketsu?” Hera asked. 

Sabine tossed up her hands dramatically. “I wish I knew.” Oh, that was the angry, hurt tone.

“Did you guys have a disagreement or did you split?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want, that’s the problem.”

“And she does.”

Sabine stabbed her cheesecake with the fork. “Sometimes I think she’s already got what she wants and she doesn’t much care about anyone else.”

“So she...broke things off?”

“No, I broke things off and she huffed away to Anoat or some other corner of the galaxy to fume about how it was all my fault.” 

“And you’re upset about it.” Hera took a sip of her wine and considered. “Do you want to get back together with her?” 

“I don’t know! I mean, things aren’t great right now. But they weren’t all that great when she was here, either.”

“Why not?”

“It’s hard to explain.” Sabine frowned and pondered the issue. “ _She_ didn’t understand what I was trying to say. I just...think about things. Why people make the decisions they do. What we should be doing with our lives. And she doesn’t, so she never worries.  And then she laughs at me for wanting to talk about it.”

“Mm,” Hera said encouragingly.

“So I get defensive and yell at her and she tells me I’m shutting her out, and I AM shutting her out because I don’t need to be told I’m stupid for worrying about the galaxy.”

“You are definitely not stupid.” Hera took another sip. She was beginning to suspect this might be a two-glass conversation. “So...you were unhappy with her then?” 

“Not...exactly. But I wasn’t happy.” Sabine swirled the wine in her glass. “When we plan things together, or talk art, or fight— on the same side I mean— I’m...alive. I can do anything. But then she turns around and makes me feel weak and young and naive, and I am not those things.”

“Do you love her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Yes. I think so. Yes. But not with a burning passion or anything like that. It’s not like you and Kanan were.” She laughed bitterly. “It’s just… if I can’t make it work with Ketsu, who CAN I be with? I don’t know how to let people in and I’m messing up my life.”  

 _You’re too good for 99.9 percent of the galaxy_ , Hera thought. She couldn’t say it out loud, though, so instead she said, “I think you’re selling yourself short. It sounds like you were trying to talk to her and not getting much back. You’ve just got… depths a lot of people don’t have. It’s not a failing.”

“Well, so do you and Kanan, and you guys managed to find each other!” Sabine set her cup down and huffed. The subtext was clear: I’m frustrated and I’m hurt. Tell me how to fix this right now.

Hera tried to think back to when she and Kanan had first met. She’d neither expected nor wanted a relationship, and she hadn’t exactly been the epitome of good behavior. “I don’t think you can compare your life to mine,” she told Sabine. “You work a lot harder for it than I did.”

“Still, you—” 

“Sabine, when I was eighteen years old, the galaxy dropped a Jedi into my lap. Not just a Jedi—KANAN. And then he stuck around doing everything I asked of him for two years while I held him at arm’s length. I don’t have any secrets to share with you. I just got insanely lucky.”

“Still, I bumble around making up problems and messing things up. You guys were perfect.”

Hera snorted. “We were NOT perfect.”

“Yes, you were.”

“That’s rosy memory. You don’t remember that we were on a months-long dry spell when you came aboard the ship?” 

“I didn’t really know about that until it ended.”

“Okay, then, you had to have heard us yelling every so often.”

“Not that often compared to most people. I mean, have you ever met my mother?”

Hera cocked her head to the side and considered her friend. “You know, you’re just like Kanan. Both of you are idealists, but you’re pragmatic enough to make things happen, so you don’t realize you’re romanticizing the world.” 

“I do not—”

“Please, I’ve seen your art. And both of you worry too much. You want a level of control over the galaxy that you’re never going to get.” 

“So you’re saying I should comm Ketsu and make it up with her.”

“No, I have no idea how you feel. But I know that you won’t be happy until you’ve found a relationship you can believe in.”

“That’s just it! How do I know when I’ve found something I can believe in?”

Hera tried to bring back that old feeling. What had it been like? “When you’re...satisfied,” she decided. “Not with the galaxy or even your life. But when you have someone you love and trust next to you and you know you’re on the right track, at least.”

Sabine said nothing.

“...Do you trust Ketsu?” Hera asked.

“To have my back? Absolutely.”

“Sometimes Kanan and I hurt each other inadvertently, because we were too caught up in our own issues. We never hurt each other carelessly, though. Do you trust her not to hurt you?”  

She got a dark, level look in return.

“Well, kriff.”

A huge sigh. “Let’s change the subject,” Sabine said. “Tell me about your love life.”

“Pfft. No. Right now my date nights consist of watching Super Mando Commandos on a constant loop.”

They talked until they were both yawning so hard that they could barely get the words out, but eventually they called it a night. Sabine took the cot in the living area while Hera crawled in next to Jace in the small bedroom and thought about the sort of things you only let yourself remember when you’re tired. She’d been so stupid back then, when she and Kanan were new. She didn’t know her own faults because she didn’t have to work hard enough for anything. Well...that wasn’t quite fair. She’d worked extremely hard, but she’d usually succeeded spectacularly. She’d never had her body so broken that it wouldn’t perform for months at a time; she’d never come up against two different things that needed her desperately and could not be reconciled. And Kanan, he’d always given her her way in the end. She’d never had to sacrifice or change her plans. Force, she’d been obnoxious.

Jacen was lying on top of the covers and she had to maneuver them out from under him then twist the whole thing so the sweaty end was down at the bottom. He lay there like a lump, not even a mumble as Hera settled in. _Where is the time going?_ she wondered like an old person. By day he was a bundle of kinetic energy under nobody’s control but his own. Dead asleep, though, he became her baby again, a relaxed, comfortable weight nestling into her side. Another year, two maybe, before the baby fat was gone and he turned into a tall kid, all knees and elbows. She and Kanan had both been like that. Most of the time she couldn’t wait until he got older so she could teach him everything. Sometimes, though—tonight—she just wanted him to stay small enough to cuddle. Nights were long on Lothal at this time of year, but Hera didn’t get much sleep, partly because Jace hogged the bed despite her repeatedly picking him up and depositing him back on his side, partly because she didn’t want to miss this.


	15. Foundation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “LANDO CALRISSIAN?!”  
> “Hera, shh!”  
> “You want to tell me how in the seven hells LANDO CALRISSIAN ended up leading this attack, Gial?”

“LANDO CALRISSIAN?!”

“Hera, shh!”

“You want to tell me how in the seven hells LANDO CALRISSIAN ended up leading this attack, Gial?”

“You weren’t here.”

“I was coming, and you knew it!”

“And yet.”

“No, don’t feed me that ‘your dedication to the Alliance’ crap, Gial, you of all people—”

“—General Syndulla, if you’ll step into the briefing room with me…”

She glowered at him. Gial Ackbar nodded his head towards the room—please.

“Oh, all right, fine.” Hera sighed in exasperation and let him hold the door for her. Old school Ackbar, still. 

“Calrissian is NOT leading the attack,” Ackbar told her as soon as the door shut.

“Good.”

“I am.”

Hera considered. “They gave you all the cruisers?”

“Yes.”

She considered some more. “All right, that’s fair.”

“I’m so very glad you think so,” he told her dryly. 

“But if you seriously think I’m taking orders from Calrissian—”

“If I tell you to, you will.”

Karabast. He knew her too well. “Yes, of course I will.”

“Lando Calrissian is leading Gold, Red, Gray, and Green squadrons, and he will spearhead the run on the Death Star’s reactor.”

Hera tried not to feel cheated. Again. “He’s a good pilot, huh?”

“Yes, he is. And he has the Millenium Falcon, which is a good ship. But I want you to look at something, since you missed the briefing.” He dialed up the plans for the half-completed battle station on the table display. “Here is the run.” A dotted blue line. “Here is the target.” A green circle. “Do you see this?” 

“That shaft is big enough to fit two freighters, side-by-side.”

“Yes.”

“That target is the size of a corvette.”

“Yes.” 

“So...we get people in there and it’s not hard.”

“As you see.”

“Hmm.”

“We have given you a command, General. In the field, as ever.”

“I’m interested.”

The blue and green disappeared, and a new green spot lit the entrance to the tunnel. “This is where we begin the run on the Death Star’s reactor. If we can’t get pilots in there and keep them protected once they enter, we can’t complete the mission.”

Oh. Hera tried not to grin. “You want me to guard the entrance.”

“You and four squadrons. Can you do it?”

She considered. Shooting down TIE fighters was her specialty. It would be difficult not to miss any in a pitched battle, a real challenge, but she could do it. Shooting them down while staying in one area and not getting blown to bits, herself… Now that was a worthy task. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s good.” 

“We finally get to attack a Death Star.”

“I can’t believe they named it the same thing again.”

“This from a galactic empire that decided ‘Death Star’ was a good name in the first place.”

“Yes, I suppose that puts it into perspective.”

“Don’t you have a transport called ‘Phantom 2?’”

“Let’s not quibble, Gial.”

 

...

 

Hera saw Rex off at the flight deck. “You be careful,” she told him. “Watch out for those kids, and don’t let them do anything dumb.”

He hugged her so hard she thought her ribs would crack. “All I have to do is hide behind some trees, General. You keep up the fancy fighting, okay?”

“Born for it.”

“Yeah.” He grinned, a wry thing. “Me, too.”

Rex boarded the Tydirium and Hera watched, waiting for it to leave.

“General Syndulla!” a voice called from behind her. “Hey, Hera!” Lando, of all people. 

“Calrissian, how did we get so lucky as to end up with you?”

He ignored her tone, as ever. “Eh, you know how it is. I’ve got some good business interests, some good friends…”

“No. Friends, you?”

“I’m as surprised as you are! Speaking of friends—” he clapped her on the shoulder— “I was sorry to hear about Kanan.” Hera blinked. That had been five years ago.Then, putting on his particular brand of smarmy sympathy, he asked her, “How has your sex life recovered?” 

It was so unexpected, and so Lando, that she burst out laughing. “Classified!” she told him. “And you will never have the clearance.”

“Ah, well, a man can dream.”

He’d changed, but not that much. It hadn’t been a pick-up line, though—just a joke to make her feel better, something naughty and unexpected amidst a long list of sincerity and platitudes. The Tydirium’s engines hummed to life and they watched it take off, Lando uncharacteristically silent as it went. “Your friends are in there?” Hera asked. 

“They are.”

“Mine too.”

 

…

 

Space battles typically didn’t last long. One side blew the other up (or EVERYBODY blew up), and then it was done. Endor was the longest combat flight of Hera’s life.

The Alliance fleet jumped into...a LOT of Star Destroyers. And the Death Star itself, looming as large as a moon. She’d forgotten how big those thing were. Get in fast, she thought. Finish this job before they can scramble all of their forces. “All wings, report in,” she called.

“Phoenix Squadron, standing by.”

“Orange Squadron, standing by.” 

“Blue Squadron, standing by.”

“Yellow Squadron, standing by.”

“Phoenix and Orange,” she called. “We’re going to beeline for that Death Star. Blue, Yellow, you’re flanking. Keep Imperial fighters off all squadrons and keep us moving.”

“Copy, Phoenix Leader.”

“Commence run.” Even now alarms were sounding in all those Star Destroyers, on-duty pilots donning helmets and climbing into their fighters, the rest scrambling into their gear. They wouldn’t encounter the onslaught of TIEs for a few minutes, though. She muted the comm. “Chop, what do you read on that thing?”

He grumbled a negative.

Hera frowned. “You have NO readings? Not even static from interference?

Nothing.

That didn’t make any sense. “You’re sure you would be able to tell if they were jamming us?”

Unless the Empire had invented some completely new method of scrambling signals, he could tell.

Unless they... Of course they’d invented a new method. She unmuted the comm, but Lando’s voice was already calling, “Break off the attack! That shield is still up.”  

“You heard him!” Hera called. “About face!” She pulled the Ghost up sharp, watching in relief as the fighters behind her followed suit. She muted the comm again. “Great, Chop. Now what?” 

Ackbar’s voice, “We have enemy ships in sector 47!”

Oh. That was what. “Do we have a plan for getting that shield down, or is this just for fun?” Hera asked.

“Han will have that shield down. Fly pretty, Phoenix Leader.”

Fly pretty. He had some nerve. But Rex was on the strike team too, after all, and she remembered throwing fighters at a blockade, trusting her own people to take care of the planetary defenses. Okay, Hera. Keep your pilots alive and buy them time to work down there. “All right, you heard him. Engage those TIE fighters. Chase them away from the cruisers. Stick with your wingman and force them to fight two-on-two. Make your skill count.”

A chorus of “yes, sirs” sounded over the comm. She knew every one of those voices.

“May the Force be with you,” Ackbar said.

Oh, it will, Hera thought.

Then five TIEs came at her all at once, and she and Mart dove right into the middle of them, rendering them unable to shoot lest they be caught in their own crossfire. Wedge Antilles led Red Squadron by moments after they’d dispatched the group, howling like a krayt dragon and having way too much fun. Hera and Mart waited until the X-wings had passed, then caught the TIES that were chasing them. Some of them, anyway. Several of the remainder peeled off and came after Phoenix Squadron.

Skill, not luck, Hera reminded herself. Skill, not luck. Take it slow and wait for your chance. Don’t make stupid mistakes. You’ve got a long time. Outfly them.

And then it was nothing but the melding of instinct and analysis that was combat, flying in her zone, keeping an eye all around her, keeping the other eye on the shape of the battle as a whole.

Until the Death Star started blowing things up.

“Get the cruisers out of range!” Hera screamed into the command channel. All the other squadron leaders were saying the same thing, a cacophony of voices. The fighters could avoid fixed beams like that one, but the bigger ships were toast. “Home One, get out of there!”

“Break off the attack.” Even now, Ackbar sounded steady and measured.

“We won’t get another chance,” Lando argued. “Han will have that shield down, we’ve just got to give him more time.”

He was right. Fight now or lose...just like always. “Back the cruisers out of range; the fighters will engage,” she argued. That thing could blow up a planet, huh? Let them get frustrated trying to pick off fighters one by one. Meanwhile, she could bounce TIES off the surface of the big ships for a while.

Lando was thinking the same thing. “Move in as close as you can and engage those Star Destroyers at point-blank range!” Yeah, that would work.

“Hey, Gold Leader,” she said. “You want to stay and dance?” 

“I knew you couldn’t resist me forever, Phoenix Leader.”

“Yeah, yeah, you keep those delusions. You’re going to need them.” She shot two TIEs out of her way and sped towards the Star Destroyers. “You take the six Destroyers on the left, Gold Leader. We’ll take the six on the right.”

“Phoenix leader, I like your style.”

“I’ve picked up one!” Dek called, panic in his voice. “He’s got a lock on me.” 

“Serra, get on it!”

Serra shot the threatening TIE out of the air without even slowing down. A moment later she caught an ion blast right in the fuel port and exploded before she could even call for help.

“Stay alive!” Hera yelled. “Your only job right now is to keep each other alive until the shield goes down!” She flew a tight loop around the Star Destroyer’s communications tower and lost the TIE fighter on her tail when it cut the corner too close and crashed against the dish. Then she and Mart ran straight at each other, picking off the fighters on the other’s tail as they went. He wiggled his s-foils as he made the close pass over her, pilot-speak for “Hi, there.” She laughed, but all this was minutiae. They’d never take out all of the TIEs, and she hadn’t gotten in any good hits on the Destroyers.

Then one of Green Squadron went down, crashing into the foredeck of a Venator class ship and sending it right into a Super Star Destroyer. Not the way she wanted to take those things out.

She lost four more in quick succession, good pilots, _her_ pilots. That was enough to spook a team, turn their luck. “You’re doing great,” she told them, voice as soothing as she could make it. “We’re hanging in there.”

Ackbar made the call—Hera and the rest of her team were too busy to notice. “The shield is down. Commence attack on the Death Star’s main reactor.” 

Oh, thank the Force, she thought. “You heard the Admiral,” she called. “Same plan as before. Blue Squadron, Yellow Squadron, you’re on flank. Keep us steady on the sides. Phoenix, Orange, straight through the middle. Clear out a path for the strike team.”

No more playing the long game. Now it was all about speed. “Wedge, 0.7!” she warned. Her voice was beginning to go hoarse. Well, at this point, both speed and stamina. _Guess you’re thankful for those double-shift practices now, kids_ , she thought.  

“I’m going in,” Lando called. His copilot added something and Lando translated: “Here goes nothing.” Then the Falcon disappeared breakneck speed into the half-finished maintenance tunnel, two X-wings following it in.

“Close the gap,” Hera yelled. Her people moved in but those blasted TIEs were too FAST, and four of them slipped by before she could get a lock on them. She took out the fifth and sixth without wasting a shot. “Gold Leader, you’ve got four hostiles on your tail!”

“You guys taking a nap out there, Phoenix Leader?”

“I believe your exact words were, ‘I won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,’ so just take them out!”

This was the hard part, though. They flew a pattern, one squad guarding the entrance while everybody else kept the ships off of them, but the entire Imperial fleet was headed her way now, and Hera could tell the difference between “poor odds” and “impossible.” She was losing people left and right, trying to coordinate whose shields were maintaining and whose were gone. 

“Fly really, really fast in there, Gold Leader!”

Wedge was with him. That should help. 

“We aren’t exactly stopping for caf, Phoenix Leader!”

She moved so quickly the only thing she remembered about this part later was trying not to die. They heard nothing from the team in the reactor for five long minutes—five minutes was a death sentence in combat terms. Then:

“We got it!” Lando’s voice was pitched so high she barely recognized it. “Phoenix Leader, we got it! Get those fighters clear, we’re coming out!”

“You heard the man, go go go go go go go!” 

She was expecting to lose even more on the way out, but the Imperial pilots must have gotten a clue when the Rebels started running, and it was as if everyone together had agreed to make a break for it.

She didn’t see the explosion, though the light from its blast behind her nearly blinded her and the concussion knocked the Ghost head over heels. Hera went with the roll, using her ion engines to steer away from other ships until she’d ridden the shock wave out. 

When she looked back, she saw nothing but glowing particles and heard nothing but a collective, triumphant roar that had her wondering if her ears had gone as well as her voice. They’d done it. They’d done it.

She didn’t learn until later that both the Emperor and Vader had died with the Death Star.

 

…

 

They worked through fifteen hours, rounding up enemy combatants and patrolling the forest moon before pilots were allowed to take shifts. During that time they acquired a hundred and seven TIE fighters and a Star Destroyer, and Hera began to fantasize about flying one of those TIEs again.

Then she came off duty, landing the Ghost just beyond the Ewok village and hitting the comm button before she’d gotten on the ground.

Sabine didn’t answer. She tried a second time and got a touseled-haired version of her friend with lines from the sheet still pressed into her face. 

“We won we won we did it!” she shouted as soon as the image appeared. Behind her, Chopper beeped a string of expletive-laden excitement.

“What? Hera! Are you okay?”

“Yes! We won!”

“Slow down. I can’t understand you. Are you all right? What do you need?”

Hera took a deep breath. “Is Jace asleep?”

“Yeah.” 

“Go wake him up.”

“...Okay, but you so owe me.”

Five minutes later Sabine reappeared with a mostly asleep Jacen, who perked up when he saw her. “Hi, Mama! Hi, Chopper!”

“Okay,” Sabine said. “Go ahead.” 

“We destroyed the Death Star,” she said calmly and slowly.

“YEAH! “Woo!” Jace and Sabine high-fived. 

“The Emperor and Vader are both gone.”

“Gone?” Sabine asked.

Chopper tweeted a distinct _ha-ha_. 

“D-E-A-D.”

“Dead,” Jacen translated with a disturbing level of satisfaction.

Sabine clapped her hands over her mouth in delight. 

“The majority of the Imperial fleet destroyed or appropriated.”

A small squeak from behind Sabine’s hands.

“There’s still plenty of clean-up to do, but we’re expecting a formal surrender from most of the Moffs within hours. We won, you guys. The whole war. We won.”

Jacen whooped. Sabine picked him up and twirled him around, then swung him into her arms and kept spinning. “We won! We won!”

She watched them flip out for a solid two minutes and wondered how much her son was going to learn about fireworks tonight. Then they calmed enough to talk to her and Jace turned an eager face to the holocam. “Mama, can you come home now?” 

She winced, but only on the inside. “Not yet, love. We’ve got to finish making things safe.”

“Well, how long is it going to take to make things safe?” 

“I don’t know, baby.  A few weeks? We’re close now.” Not safe—she wasn’t naive enough to think that they’d fixed everything—but this triumph was more than she’d expected to see within her lifetime. She’d take it, and offer it to a four-year-old as a win.

“Hey—” Sabine attempted to distract Jacen, “—your mom just beat the Emperor. You want to help celebrate?”

“Yeah!” 

 _Walk it back, Sabine_ , Hera thought. _He’s going to be telling everyone that I beat the Emperor from here on out_. In an instant she realized: With the Emperor gone, so was the galaxy-wide ban on Jedi.

“Hey, Hera,” Sabine grinned at her. “We’re going to break the news to Lothal. It’s not classified or anything, is it?”

“Certainly not! They probably already have a report.”  

“Okay, then. Talk to you in the morning. WE LOVE YOU!”

“We love you! I love you, Mama!” Jace chorused, all smiles.

She laughed. “I love you guys, too.”

“Okay, bye! LOVE YOU BYE!”

“Bye, buddy.”

Hera switched off the holo, put her face in her hands and thought, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it. I’m really going to make a better galaxy for him.

Then the comm beeped again—Han Solo—and Chopper gave her a skeptical whistle.

“Of course I’m going to give him the ration bars. I just want to make him sweat for a while first. Here, watch this.”

 

…

 

“A few weeks,” she’d told them. Hera didn’t make it back to Lothal for four months. After Endor they rode on momentum, running through Onderon, Corellia, Duros, supporting dozens of worlds in their own rebellions. Mandalore liberated itself, which had been a long time coming, anyway. Hera provided the air support for Ryloth’s Resistance, wincing in embarrassment as her father demanded to know when she was going to bring that sweet baby to see him again—right as they flew in and strafed the AT-ATs that had his forces pinned down.

Then they destroyed the remainder of the Imperial fleet at Akiva.

She commed Lothal whenever she could, setting aside extra time on Jacen’s birthday. When he appeared in hologram that day he was distracted, running onto camera still talking at someone over his shoulder. “Say hi to your Mom,” Sabine’s voice advised.  

“Hi, Mama! I’m having a party.”

“Wow! Right now?” 

“No, tomorrow, but you should SEE the balloons Sabine’s doing. They have these things on the inside—”

Sabine’s face appeared, cutting Jacen off. “They’re safe,” she explained hastily. Then she gave him the “shh,” look.

“Who is invited to your party?”

“My friends from school.” Jacen had long been in school on Lothal at that point, happy and popular if often in trouble with his teachers. (“Jacen is outgoing and sweet, a good friend to all,” she recited his last report to herself. “He is ahead of his age group in all academic subjects. For next quarter, we will work on listening to his teachers and making good judgments about when to exercise caution.” She could have written it herself.) “They’re all bringing me presents,” he added. Ah, the important part. 

“Did you get my presents?” Hera asked.

“Yeah, but I liked the tooka game and the Luke Skywalker toy better than the clothes.”

“Fair enough. Luke still your favorite?”

“Ye-eah. Me and my friends, we’re going to play Jedi today, though.” 

“Lothal is crazy about its Jedi,” Sabine put in quickly. _I didn’t tell him anything_ , her tone meant.

“What are you learning in school?” Hera asked.

“I learned grav-ball!” Never anything about history or engineering or math. All games and friends. She didn’t really mind that—it was so different from her own early childhood. “Oh, and I learned a song for my music program. It’s about ‘hey, little lothcat.’” He launched into it and sang the whole thing to her. 

“I’ll record the performance for you,” Sabine promised.

“Thanks. Hey, Jacen Syndulla,” she said.

“What?” 

“You are five years old today. What’s your favorite color?”

“Green! Or yellow.” 

“Fair enough. What’s your favorite food?”

“Ice cream with meiloorun sugar sauce on top.”

“What’s your favorite thing to do?”

“Watch Battle Droids and play fight with my friends. But we don’t get in trouble, Mama.” 

“If you say so. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A Jedi!” 

Kriff. Hera took a deep breath and told herself not to worry.

“Or a pilot or a teacher or an artist. Or maybe this guy who has a pet rancor and he goes around eating up bad guys with his rancor. And then he lets kids ride it, but it doesn’t eat them unless they’re mean.”

Whew. That was...somehow a less disturbing answer. What did her level of relief say about her parenting?

Jacen turned again and chattered with somebody off-screen.

“Do I need to let you guys go?” Hera asked.

“Yeah, I think so, for now,” Sabine told her. “The first cake blew u— Uhm, it didn’t turn out great. We’re going to buy a new one.”

“I really will be back soon.”

“He’s happy, Hera. He misses you, and I am pissed off that I’m not in the fight on Mandalore right now, but we’re okay.” 

“Soon.”

“Jace, come back here and say goodbye to your mom!” 

“Bye, Mama!”

“Bye, love.”

After his holo disappeared she thought: I am just like my father. Then she put her head down and sobbed in guilt and self-pity. Chopper was rearranging some crates in the cargo bay, and she thought she had the cockpit to herself, so she didn’t pull herself together until she heard footsteps on the ladder. When Rex poked his head through the hatch she was still mopping her face guiltily.  

“Hey— hey— General— There’s no cause for that; we’re the conquering heroes.” 

“I know.”

“Today’s Jacen’s birthday, huh?”

She nodded, then burst out crying again in spite of herself. “I’m RUINING him, Rex.”

“Hera, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not even there. He knows I’m somewhere in danger. I can’t even bother to make his school performance.”

“He’s, what? Four? I’m sure there will be other school performances. I doubt his life is ruined.”

But Hera shook her head. If he stayed on Lothal, he was happy and safe in a society that adored him. And without her. When she came back she’d scoop him up and they’d be off to whatever child-unfriendly outpost came next. “I don’t want to do to him what… I don’t want him to grow up to be like me.” 

“That’s because you’re an idiot, General.”

She wiped the handkerchief across her face angrily. 

“You unhappy with the galaxy?” he asked.

She shook her head. 

“Everything you’ve been through? You’re still out here fighting and believing in us, still happy to be alive? We should all grow up to be like you.”

“That’s...incredibly nice, Rex, but you don’t really know me.”

“With all due respect, General, maybe YOU don’t really know you.”

They took Coruscant the next week with so much support from its citizens that Hera was able to leave and await a new posting.

She returned to Jacen and Sabine as a General of the New Republic.


	16. Quest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It wasn’t a stranger.  
> Hera blinked.  
> Those were montrals under the hood. She’d seen them before, a hundred times, just like this.  
> “Get away from my son,” she said, her voice coming out harsher than she’d meant it to.  
> Ahsoka looked up. “Hera, it’s good to see you.”

The buzzer on the foreward bay door sounded while Hera was in the shower. She poked her head out of the fresher dripping wet and called, “Wait a minute! Kids don’t open the doors!”

Thud thud thud went Jacen’s feet. He was definitely going to open the door.

“CHOP!” she yelled, grabbing a towel.

They were both too slow, but a moment later she heard a familiar voice: “J.Syn! Give me a fist bump! Now blow it up!” Sabine. 

Hera took her time drying off and getting dressed, muttering to herself about punishments that didn’t work and children who didn’t listen. She caught bits of their conversation. “When’s your mom going to let you grow a ponytail?” Sabine asked, and Hera called back, “When he wants to!”

When she emerged, Sabine and Jacen hadn’t moved two feet from the cargo bay ramp and Chopper had joined them. Along with another figure, cloaked and hooded in white, who knelt in front of Jacen as they talked. Hera felt a stab of fear at that sight—a stranger close enough to touch him. Still, Sabine had brought whoever it was onto the Ghost, so it must be okay. She reigned in her paranoia.  

It wasn’t a stranger.

Hera blinked.

Those were montrals under the hood. She’d seen them before, a hundred times, just like this.

“Get away from my son,” she said, her voice coming out harsher than she’d meant it to.

Ahsoka looked up. “Hera, it’s good to see you.”

But Hera took Jacen’s hand and dragged him back. 

“Hey! Mo-om! I was meeting Sabine’s friend and she’s a JEDI!” He pointed to Ahsoka’s belt. That’s a lightsaber!”

Great. This was just great. This was a transport wreck. “We thought you were dead,” she told Ahsoka. _You should be happy to see her_ , she told herself. _She’s alive. Your friend is alive._ Hope and bitterness both posed a danger though, and she squelched them down, along with any relief at seeing Ahsoka.

“I was...lost. I’m back now.”

 _You were lost at a really convenient time,_ Hera thought. “I’m sorry,” she said out loud. “Just a minute. I need a minute. I’ll be right back. Jacen, this is a grown-up conversation.  You can play vids, but you need to go to my bunk now.”

“No WAY! There’s a for-real Jedi right here, and she’s even cooler than Luke Skywalker. She’s got two lightsabers!” He protested, but he knew better than to actually fight Hera, and he let himself be marched along at too quick a pace. She hadn’t let go of his hand yet.

“Hera, wait—” Ahsoka followed her. Do not follow me, she thought. Give me two minutes to get my thoughts in order so I can be decent to you and not say all the things that are in my head right now…

Kanan had always followed her when she was angry, too.  

“You never let me do anything fun!” Jacen yelled.

“Hera—” Ahsoka touched her arm and that was IT. She whirled, holding Jacen’s hand too tightly, and screamed, “Where WERE you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You could have saved them!” 

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“You think I care what the Jedi say is ‘meant to be’?!” 

“I’m not a Jedi.”

“Well, if it looks like a vornskr…” She was being unpleasant. Nasty. She had to get away.

“Vids,” she told Jacen, and this time he scampered, eyes wide. She took a deep, calming breath. “I apologize,” she told Ahsoka. “That was inappropriate. Give me a minute. I’ll put on some caf.”

Chopper reminded her that it was the middle of the afternoon and he was not watching after Jacen in the morning if she fried her sleep circuits.

“Caf would be nice,” Ahsoka said.

She purposely did not use the Spiran blend, though the other kind they had in stock was cheap. Usually she loved the smell, but nobody needed it invoking more memories today. She stood over the percolator while it brewed, breathing in the steam and reminding herself of all the times things had gotten better. Warm, caffeinated liquid, Hera. You’re okay. 

She had no idea where Ahsoka had been. Probably she’d undergone something difficult, more a trial than a fault. No victim blaming, Hera, she reminded herself. If you can’t say something nice, try listening instead. And also: Don’t feel anything right now or this is going to go south again. You can save that for later.

“You don’t have to stand in the cargo bay,” she called to them. “Come in here.” They filed into the Ghost’s common area, Chopper pushing Sabine out of the way to get there first, and Hera served caf to Ahsoka Tano, last of the Jedi Order. 

“I owe you an explanation,” Ahsoka said, stirring her drink. Hera bit down on her response. “Did Ezra tell you what the temples are?”

She shook her head. “He said he saw things. I think he saw Kanan. But there wasn’t really time to talk about it.”

“I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that they are...gateways. Ezra knew I was alive. He reached back in time and saved me. And when I returned… We were sent to Malachor by Yoda to seek something; I didn’t know what.” 

“I thought it was the Sith holocron.”

Ahsoka snorted, a wry little laugh. “Did that do your crew much good?” Hera stared at her, waiting. “No, not the Sith holocron. It was someone outside of time, and I had to go…” She shrugged. “At any rate. I couldn’t come back until the quest was done. Now it’s done. And I promised Ezra that when I got back I would find him.”

Hope grew dangerously in her heart, pushing its way up. Hera had to clear her throat. “You’re going to find Ezra?” 

“WE’RE going to find Ezra,” Sabine corrected. “He’s counting on me.”

Oh, that was how this all went bad. There was the reason not to hope. “No,” she said.

“It’s not really your decision, Hera.” Sabine’s words held no sting, though.

“No,” she said again. “You’re not leaving me, too.”

But Sabine crossed her arms and threw her own words back at her. “Do you trust me?”

“Too much to lose you.”

Chopper interjected, pointing out that a Jedi was more than capable of handling a road trip. They were ganging up on her. They weren’t, she knew, but she felt threatened all the same.

“Please don’t do this to me,” she said to Sabine.

“I haven’t given up on him. Have you?”

No, she’d never given up, but for all of their military victories Hera had to admit that she’d been facing defeat in her personal life for quite some time now. If she lost Sabine, too, it was game over. No. It wasn’t, and that made things even worse.

I’m not giving up on you. She’d said that to Ezra when he couldn’t hear it. 

“We’re coming with you,” she decided.

Chop blatted his enthusiasm for the idea.

Ahsoka and Sabine didn’t react. Didn’t look happy, didn’t mount arguments against her. Sabine just looked at her caf and said quietly, “You can’t.” 

“As you say, it’s not really your decision.”

“But it is mine,” Ahsoka told her.

Hera bristled, but Sabine broke in to keep the peace. “You’ve got to be here for Jacen.”

“He’s tough. He can come along.”

“No, Hera.” Sabine took a deep breath, steeling herself to say something difficult. “We don’t know what we’re going to find, but whatever it is it’s kept Ezra from coming home for six years. Maybe Thrawn. Probably worse.” 

“We can face it together.”

“No.”

She swallowed hard, trying for long moments to keep whatever that reaction was inside.

“Trust me,” Sabine said. “I’m not leaving you. I’m going to put us back together again.”

All of this had started with hope. She was strong enough to let it end that way, too. She couldn’t say the words, though, so she just nodded and finished her caf.

“When are you leaving?” she finally managed. 

“Now.”

“No. Jacen misses you. Stay until evening, at least.”

Ahsoka considered and nodded, and Sabine said, “Okay.” So they had dinner and played B’Shingh, and Hera studiously did not let herself consider that these might be her last memories of Sabine. They were happy memories. They weren’t even memories yet. 

Jace and Sabine did the dishes while she downloaded every star chart they’d ever mapped for Ahsoka. “I don’t know that these will really help,” she said.

“They might.”

“If you need backup, if you can contact me, I’ll come.”

“Hera, we’re going to be okay.”

She watched the download in silence. Star maps were big, the largest items in the Ghost’s databases.

“He needs training, you know,” Ahsoka said after a moment.

Hera looked at her in question.

“Your son. Kanan’s son. Anybody who knew the both of you can see who he is right away. He’ll be happier with some training. Less confused. Capable of blocking things out, if that’s what he decides he wants.”

Hera shook her head. “I don’t even know if he’s Force sensitive yet.” 

Ahsoka gave her a level look. “Yes, you do.”

“He’s a normal little boy.”

“He could be more.”

Hera had kept it together all night, been polite, had fun even. Now she snapped again, “And how is that going to happen, exactly? You’re going to come back and train him? Make him just good enough to attract the wrong sort of attention, then disappear again?” 

“I’m sorry,” Ahsoka repeated. But she wasn’t really sorry. She was confident that she’d done the right thing, calm in that smug Jedi assurance that she knew better than everyone else. “You can be as angry at me as you need,” she told Hera, “but I’m not going to fail them. I promise you that.”

“Just…bring them back.” In an instant, she was perilously close to tears, too much fear flooding her heart. It made no sense for a nice, quiet evening before a journey. “You go out there and you find him to bring him back to ME. Not because the Force needs him to make another grand sacrifice. Bring him back to his family.”

“I will,” Ahsoka promised. 

“And don’t you dare come back here without Sabine.”

“I won’t.”

Not even Ahsoka could really promise that, though. _What if you die?_ Jacen’s little voice came back to her, filled with terror at something that hadn’t happened yet.  “And go see Rex before you leave,” she told Ahsoka. “He’s not doing well, but he’ll remember you. And…” she took another deep breath. “It will mean so much to him to know you’re alive. You have no idea.”

Then Ahsoka’s impassive mask did crumple, just a little, the beginnings of wrinkles creasing those white lines on her forehead. “Hera, if I could have saved him… If I could have died instead of him—”

“I know,” Hera said. She rubbed her face tiredly, rubbing the resentment out of her heart as she did so. “You already made that choice at Malachor. I know you would.”

Jacen stayed up late to wish them off. When they left, Chopper said goodbye with his usual cheerful prognostications—even though the trip shouldn’t be difficult, he was certain they would find some way to complicate things. Then Hera and Sabine hugged each other so hard they eventually had to stop for air. “I love you,” she said to Sabine, putting all the force of her will behind the statement, as if it would send her away with protection. 

“I love you, too.” Sabine said. “We’ll see each other again.” She picked Jacen up and squeezed him and said, “I love you, too, you goofball. Don’t forget me, okay?”

“Nuh uh. No way. Bring me back a present.” He kissed Sabine sloppily on the cheek.

And then they were gone. 

Hera put Jacen to bed and gave the galley one last check. A single cricket had gotten into the ship and she could hear it chirping happily near the laundry unit. Or maybe it was lonely, trying to find its way out. One plate balanced on the edge of the sink, the drainer too full for it to fit. She thought of Ezra and Sabine and Zeb and Kanan and her mother, weighed her options, and smashed the shit out of it against the counter. It felt good.

“Mama?” Jacen, in the doorway. Clearly he had not really been asleep.

“What, love?” she asked calmly.

“What broke?”

“Just a plate.” 

“Oh.” He considered. “Okay. Where are we going?”  

“Hmm? Nowhere.”

“But we ARE, we are going somewhere.”

“No, baby, that’s Sabine and Ahsoka.” 

“No, WE’RE going,” he insisted.

Where WERE they going? she wondered more philosophically. She’d given her life to the Rebellion, everything that she had, though she’d finally learned to put some pieces aside for herself in the past few years. She’d been rewarded with rank and her pick of commands, though commands couldn’t give her the things she really wanted. And the New Republic didn’t need her anymore, not as desperately as they had for so long. They’d won the war. Not every battle, sure, but...they’d won.

Hera picked up jagged pieces of crockery and considered her options. She had never made any plans for what to do if they won. Had she believed it impossible, or was she just afraid she’d hex their chances? She’d talked with Kanan a few times about going after the slave rings someday, but that had been when they were much younger and she’d had a Jedi on her side. And they’d imaged the future, idly, of course. Kanan had mentioned kids, an open area somewhere for them to run, puttering across the galaxy together until the Ghost fell apart around them (which it wouldn’t. She’d see to that). He’d talked about working with Ezra to provide a safe haven for Force sensitives. Not rebuilding the Jedi Order, just offering them safety and a path to walk so they wouldn’t have to misuse those powers, alone and angry. But she’d shaken her head every time—No, no, I don’t know. I can’t think about that right now. I have to keep fighting. “Hera,” he’d said. “You deserve more than just war.” “I have more,” she’d told him.

Jacen didn’t bug her for an answer. He’d curled up in the rattan chair and was muttering quietly to his stuffed tooka, obviously hoping she wouldn’t remember him and make him go to bed. If she played her cards right, she’d have at least ten more years with him. Ten years was a long time, though not as long as it used to be. She might as well enjoy them right now. The New Republic could do without her. Her father had been begging her to come for a stay on Ryloth, and although Jacen understood anything she said in Ryl, he refused to speak it back to her. The trip would be good for him. He’d never seen the Corellian shipyards, and he’d love Naboo. Rion would be fun with a kid, too. Maybe they could even take Rex back to Kamino before he got any worse, although he might prefer Coruscant. They were refurbishing the Jedi Temple, she’d heard, turning it into a museum. And there was lots of empty space out there between worlds. Jacen was only five, but he could steer on her lap already. He could learn to fly.

“Hey, Jace?” she said.

“Hey, Mom?”

“What if we go everywhere?”


	17. Blue-Eyed Son

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LOOK LOOK [DARTHBREEZY](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthBreezy) MADE THE ART!!!!! Sabine's picture: <https://darthbreezy.tumblr.com/post/172837127934/for-gondalsqueen-and-her-next-season>

Within a year, Hera and Jacen hopped back into military life. She had plenty of vacation time, so they could take off and see the galaxy whenever they liked, and having a stable place and a community was important for Jacen. Hera had had that growing up.

So she was on Coruscant, helping out with combat training, when the other shoe finally dropped. Except that it was her day off and she wasn’t training pilots, she was trying to replace a particularly disgusting air filter on outside of the Ghost while Jace ran around recklessly on top of the ship, probably learning all sorts of enriching things.

“Hey, Mama. Mo-om!”

She stared at the bolt. It was stripped smooth; that’s why she’d skipped this filter last time.

“Mom. Mom.”

“What, love?”

“I’m bored.” 

“Find something to do.”

“There IS nothing to do.”

“Well, come down here then and help me.”

He considered. “Are you wiring stuff?”

“No.” 

“Are you taking stuff apart?”

“Sort of. I’m replacing this disgusting air filter.” 

“Ew. No thanks.” He flopped down on the ship just above her head; Hera heard the thunk. Hmm… She tried to tighten the wrench on the bolt as far as it would go and then use her body weight to push the handle down. It slipped, she scraped her knuckles, she cursed.

“Hey, Mom.” 

“Hey, what?”

The naughty pause indicated that nothing good was coming. “Bloodflowers are pink, your feet really stink.” He burst into giggles.

“Hmm. Did you learn that at school?”

“No, Poe told me to say it to you.”

“Why am I not surprised? Well, jacinder are blue, your feet stink too.” Maybe she could just CLEAN the filter and keep using it. ...No.

“Sunblossoms are yellow, your feet really smell-o,” he fired back almost immediately. Oh, good one, kid. 

“N’Omis are purple, you’re about to get in trouble,” she told him. 

“Purple and trouble don’t rhyme.”

“They do in Ryl.”

“That joke is still not funny, Mom.”

Hera grinned to herself. “Jace, you have any ideas for loosening a stripped bolt?”

“Maybe hold the wrench on with bubble gum?”

“I don’t think that’s going to work.” 

“Nope, then. Let me think about it.” He ran off towards the middle of the ship. “HEY there’s really cool bugs here!”

“What kind?”

“Beetles. Blue and shiny. Huh.” Then he went silent, playing with the insects.

Hera picked up a vibrotorque and just fused the darn thing to the bolt. She could unfuse it later, but somehow this stupid air filter had to come off.

She was absorbed in her work and used to people walking back and forth across the main hangar, so she didn’t even register the footsteps until they were almost upon her. Then they stopped, and the absence of sound was unsettling. Hera looked up as their visitor cleared his throat.

She saw him with the sunlight behind him, outlining his shoulder, and the thought went through her like a shock: I know him. I know him like I know myself.

He wasn’t quite the same, though. A little broader. His hair had grown long again and his beard was bushy, and she thought, terrified: Maybe I’m seeing things. Maybe it’s not him.

Then he spoke: “Hera, you haven’t changed a bit,” and she knew for sure. 

The vibrotorque hit the ground and she threw herself at him with a little moan, and he was taller than her—taller than her; she had to stand on tiptoe to put her arms around his neck and hug him. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed too.

“What are you doing here?” Hera asked, wiping a hand over her face. She touched the lightsaber at his belt before he could answer. “You got it back.”

“Yeah, uhm...I think I’m supposed to be a...present? Or something?” He unhooked his lightsaber from his belt and ignited it experimentally for her to see. “Good as ever.”

“Wow, cool!” Oh, no. Footsteps thumping on top of the Ghost, coming their way. Jacen launched himself at them before she had time to yell a warning. 

In an instant the lightsaber blade was gone, Jacen caught safely in his arms, and Hera yelling, scared witless, “How many times have I told you NOT to jump from the top of the ship?! It’s not safe!”

“It’s safe for me,” Jacen said blithely. “I never get hurt.”

“Well, this time you almost skewered yourself on a lightsaber blade!” 

Jacen peered at his savior, blue eyes into blue eyes. “I’ve seen you in pictures,” he declared.

“Jacen Syndulla, meet Ezra Bridger,” Hera said. “Ezra, Jacen.”

Ezra had acted fast to catch the kid, but then he just stood bewildered, looking between Jacen and her. “Syndulla?” he asked, trying to do the mental math and failing. “Hera—did you…?”

“They didn’t tell you,” she said. Of course they didn’t. Sabine would think it was a great joke, them surprising each other like this. 

Ezra shrugged.

“He’s my son.” Now understanding began to dawn on his face. “And Kanan’s.”

“He’s…” A long breath. “How—?”

Hera inclined an eyebrow at him. The usual way, that look meant.

“I mean, I know HOW, but… Oh, good Force.” Ezra sat Jacen on his feet. “Hey, kid, let me take a look at you.”

Jacen stood dutifully and preempted the questions that he knew would come. “Yes, I’m really Twi’leki. I’m half-Twi’leki. No, I don’t have lekku. Yes, she’s really my mom. No, I’m not adopted.” 

“You look just like your father.”

He grinned. “Yes, I look just like my father. Except Sabine says prettier because I look like my mom too.”

Ezra laughed. “She’s right.”

“Did Sabine come back with you?” Jacen asked the question that Hera couldn’t bring herself to voice.

“Yeah, she’s here. But she sent me on first and said I was...a present?”

“For me,” Jacen explained. “Yeah, you’re a pretty great present.”

“Ahsoka?” Hera asked softly.

He shook his head.

She swallowed down...what was that feeling? Sadness, yes, but mostly guilt. Don’t you dare come back here without them, she’d told Ahsoka. “Ezra,” she asked, hardly daring to hope. “Are you going to...stay?"

“Well…” he considered. “I came to see you first, so I have to do some debriefing with Reb—” he corrected himself, “—with New Republic command. Things might not be as smooth flying as we think.” He frowned with the memory of something dark, but they would tackle that later. “But,” his eyes met hers again, “other than that I’m at loose ends. I just want to hang with you guys for a while, figure out where I fit in again.”

Hera nodded. Ezra and Sabine both back. The ship would be crowded again.

“Are you crying?” Ezra asked.

“No. I’ll arrange to use some vacation time and comm Lira San. We’ll go see Zeb.” 

“Guess I’d better get on this briefing, then.”

“Wait—” she caught his wrist. He’d just gotten here and she was loathe to let him go so quickly. Plus, there were six years of his life she knew nothing about, almost seven, and some important questions needed to be asked. Did you have a life out there? Did you want to come back, or was it a duty? Did you know where you were? Were you kept from us? “It’s been a long time,” she settled. “Are you—okay?”

“I am now.” He took her hand and squeezed it in both of his. “Don’t worry, Hera. I’ll be back in a few hours. I mean it this time.”

_They get away from you so quickly, even when you’re holding their hands._

She nodded and let go.  

“Mom?” Jacen’s voice was surprisingly subdued.

“Yes, love?”

“Are you okay?”

It was meant to be a laugh, but it came out mixed with tears. “Yeah, baby, I really am.” She looked out at the sky and thought, Thank you, Ahsoka, thank you. If I could wish for anything in the world, this would be it.

 

...

 

They parked the Ghost in Zeb and Alexsandr’s front yard and surprised them with Ezra. Hera thought Zeb was going to pass out for a minute, and then she thought Ezra was going to pass out from being squeezed too hard.

“Where in all the hells were you?!”

“Uhm...away? Later, okay?”

The first night on Lira San, they all ran Jacen ragged. Hera put him to bed a half-hour late and mostly asleep before his head hit the pillow. Then she crept back into the common area and shut the door. Zeb pounded his mug on the table and declared, “Caf, dejarik, and partying all night! Er, quiet partying so we don’t wake up the kid.” 

Hera laughed and passed more mugs around. “Fire up the board, Chop.”

They played two games of dejarik and then ended up just talking, which was kind of the plan to begin with. At first it was remember-when:

“Remember when Chopper knocked Ezra off the top of the Ghost while we were ten kilometers up?”

“Remember that time Sabine attached a smoke grenade to a little mouse droid and then drove it into your dad’s team?” 

“No,” Hera said. “I missed that.”

“It looked so funny,” Zeb chuckled. “Just—zhhhhoom, right at them.”

“You know,” Alexsandr put in, “to read the reports on paper, you looked like idiots who kept getting away only because every single soldier on Lothal was incompetent.” 

“Yeah, that was true,” Zeb told him.

They brought up things they’d left unspoken before.

“Alexsandr, he never TOLD us that you guys were trapped under the ice together.”

“Well, not never,” Zeb protested.

“‘Oh, by the way, ISB Agent Kallus decided he’s going to be on our team now and smuggle information to us,’ is not EXACTLY breaking it smoothly,” Ezra pointed out.

“I remember you were weird when we picked you up from that planet, Zeb!” Sabine added. 

“How could you tell the difference?” Ezra was jumping back into their old routines nicely.

“Hey! I’m never weird!”

Chopper defended Zeb for once—“ugly” and “weird” were two different things.

Hera just laughed at them. 

“Okay,” Ezra said at around 0100. “This has been fantastic, but I want to know about all the stuff I missed.” 

“Hera blew up the Death Star!” Sabine shouted.

“Shh! I did not.”

“Did too. Second Death Star.”

Chopper protested that HE had blown up the second Death Star.

“You did not!” Hera told him.

Ezra looked bewildered. “What’s a Death Star?”

They all stared at him. 

“Seriously?” Zeb asked.

“Come on, guys, what’s a Death Star?”

“He’s been gone for a while,” Sabine shrugged.

“Do you even know the ending of Clone Wars 2?”

“What’s Clone Wars?”

Zeb chuckled evilly. “We’ve got the only unspoiled virgin in the galaxy here.”

“Hey! I am not—!” Ezra threw up his hands in exasperation.

It was good times. Old times.

“We can catch you up on a lot of it,” Zeb told Ezra, taking mercy. “Sabine took lots of holos.” 

“And painted lots of pictures,” Hera added. “Oh, I think I have those here! You gave them to me for safekeeping, and I put them…” she considered. The top shelf on her closet, she was fairly certain.

“Did you look at the paintings?” Sabine asked.

“No, I didn’t want to invade your privacy, and I didn’t know which ones you wanted me to see.”

“Hera, you didn’t even open the package? Those were for you, especially the canvases!”

“Well, you didn’t tell me that! Wait a minute, I’ll go get them.”

She moved a bunch of stuff aside in her bunk and they were right where she’d expected, left-hand corner of the closet shelf, tied in a plain cloth. Sabine did most of her work on walls, and the portable versions—holos of the originals—fit on a few tiny datachips. Some of this was more traditional canvas work, though. Hera took it all back to the common area and handed the data chips to Sabine. “Which ones first?”

“Uhm...This one’s from right after Ezra left. Let’s start there.” Sabine handed the chip to Chopper and he put it in the dataport on the table. There they all were, looking...shocky and thin, actually. Mostly holos of her or Zeb or Chopper working, their expressions studious and absorbed as they bent over the glow of a datapad. Sabine clicked through a whole series of Hera and Chopper fixing the Ghost, literally seventy-five holos of the same thing, as if she were afraid she wouldn’t get another chance to record it. They were busy, and animated by that work, but never happy. Ezra frowned and asked no questions. 

Sabine thumbed through an entire collection of Lothali murals: “Let’s just get to the people.” And then the “people” were...mostly Hera, six months pregnant, shot after shot captured at exactly the right moment to look like a portrait—half-turning to answer some question, or looking down at a cloth in her hands in the early morning light, or palm on her stomach with an expression as if she were listening to something only she could hear.

Ezra’s face took on that stone look it got when he was trying not to cry. Then he rallied and said, “I’ve missed a lot.”

“Yeah, kid, we keep telling you that.”

“These are...art,” Hera said, wondering. 

“No, they’re just holos. The art is on the canvas over there. Open them up.”

So she untied the bundle, but the first painting wasn’t any of them. It was Kanan—a portrait from the waist up, the full beard and scarring across his eyes that they remembered from those last two years. Hera couldn’t see the crooked nose because he was facing the viewer, holding a green-haired baby on his shoulder who was clearly sacked out and comfortably sleeping. Kanan looked down at him, kissing the top of his head.

Nobody said anything for a long moment. 

“I painted it right after Jace was born.” Sabine sounded nervous now. “But you were really exhausted, and that didn’t seem like a good time to give it to you. Then I forgot about it until I was cleaning out all my stuff before leaving with Ahsoka.”

They were all looking at Hera, and there was nowhere to hide her reaction.

“I’m… I’m sorry if it—”

“Sabine, thank you,” Hera cut her off. She tried to keep her voice even and utterly failed. “I love it.” Then she dropped her head to the table and sobbed.

Zeb picked her up bodily and just plunked her onto his lap, and then they were all fighting teary eyes. She’d cried for Kanan—really, for herself and her own loneliness—hundreds of times over the years, but it hadn’t happened in a while. This time, it finally didn’t hurt.

She pulled herself together and they talked about Kanan until dawn.


	18. Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end. Kind of.

Something had happened to Ezra out there, something he wasn’t ready to talk about until after this vacation was over. None of them pried. He was...different, in a lot of ways. Grown up. He finally believed in his own adequacy. With that confidence came an edge of brooding that reminded her of Kanan, though. Hera hoped he stuck around where they could support him, whatever he was facing.

In other ways he was still their Ezra—surprisingly predictable given all the time that had passed, and still the baby of the crew until they adjusted their thinking and changed the way they treated him accordingly.

To no one’s surprise, he and Jacen got along well. Their bonding mostly consisted of wrestling, with some sword fighting and a little chase for variety. Hera could have done without the just-before-bed play that infallibly kept Jacen awake and hyper. She didn’t say anything, though, because the two of them had a lot of time to make up for.  

Tonight Jacen was trying to push Ezra into Alexsandr’s small fishpond. Since Ezra vastly outweighed him he was failing, but he made up for it by practically strangling his opponent in the process — by accident, Hera was pretty sure. Really, Ezra had bought this when he picked Jacen up off the ground and threw him over his shoulder. 

Oh, and that was a knee in the face. 

“Ow!” Ezra protested. “Kid, you are deadly!” He twisted out from under Jacen and somehow they both ended up on their feet, facing each other. Quick as a flash, Ezra tapped Jacen’s shoulder. 

“Hey!” 

“Block me, then. Like this.” He showed Jacen how to bring his hands up in front of him and deflect the blows. Then he tapped Jace’s knee. “Got you! This is how you block with your feet. Try to tap my knees.” 

“Your shoulders, too!” 

“Sure, if you can reach.” 

Hera watched her son eye a nearby boulder. She hoped he was planning to climb on it and not throw it at Ezra.

Then they both went at each other, jumping towards a shoulder or knee and dashing out again, blocking on one side and darting in on the other. Ezra went easy on Jacen, but he sped up as they played and Jace kept pace with him. 

The whole thing ended when Jacen got sick of it, yelled “ATTACK!” and somersaulted across the ground towards his target. He bumped harmlessly against Ezra’s legs, but in the attempt not to step on him Ezra backpedalled and, with a whirling of arms, ended up in the water. 

Hmm. Somehow they had both ended up in the water.

“Bathtime!” Hera called.

“It’s not!” 

“It is, in fact, a solid hour past BEDtime.” 

Ezra hit the shower in Zeb’s place while Hera scrubbed the slime off of Jacen in the Ghost’s fresher. Forty-five minutes later they’d finished showering, cleaning teeth, a snack that he didn’t ask permission to get, and teeth a second time, and they were cuddled together on Jacen’s bunk reading their nightly chapter of whatever novel Jace had picked. Since he’d gotten old enough to understand them, he’d mostly chosen from a children’s series of adventure stories about — guess what? — Jedi. Hera, remembering her own childhood, couldn’t blame him. 

She read: “Shuyen closed her eyes and took a deep breath, reaching out to the Force as she fell. She could feel the air rushing past her. The wind whipped at her face roughly, but it wasn’t enough to hold her up…” 

Sabine passed by the door and stopped to listen for a minute. “Are you reading Knights of the Old Republic to him?” 

“Yes.” 

“That’s sending mixed messages, don’t you think?”

“He likes it,” Hera told her, aware of how defensive she sounded. “It’s a good story. Who am I to tell him what to like?”

Sabine held her hands up. “Fair enough. Carry on.”

Hera finished the chapter, the Jedi who had fallen off the cliff while being chased by Sith warriors arriving unscathed back at the temple. “That’s a good stopping place for tonight,” she told Jacen, smoothing his hair back. He’d started to grow it out and they were both learning how to manage the tangles that was causing, but right now it was clean and brushed and smelled like shampoo, and she breathed in the scent gratefully. 

He nestled into to her side. “Mama?” 

“Yes?”

“Is Rex going to come back?”

“No, baby, Rex isn’t going to come back.”

“But Ezra came back.” 

“Ezra wasn’t dead, love,” she told him gently. “Nobody comes back from the dead.” She paused for a moment to let that sink in, then continued, “I know it’s hard. It hurts for me, too.” 

“I like Ezra.” He was trying to think something out. Hera waited. “But...I’d rather have Rex.”

“I can understand that.”

“But that’s mean of me, right?”

“Well…” she answered as honestly as she could. “You don’t want someone to die. You just miss the person you love. I think it’s very normal. Probably not the best idea to mention it to Ezra, though. It might hurt his feelings.”

He nodded and she tucked him into bed with a song and a kiss. “Sleep,” she told him. “You are exhausted. Go to sleep.” 

“Okay,” Jacen said around a big yawn. 

Sneaking out of the room a moment later she passed by the open doorway of Ezra’s bunk and caught a snatch of conversation. “...her turn for a while,” Sabine was saying. Then Ezra: “Coruscant is good place to stay, anyway. We’re going to need to talk about defenses. Maybe exploratory missions, but that might be a bad idea. IF they even decide to believe me.” 

Keep moving, Hera, she told herself. She went to the cockpit to give the monitors one last check for the evening and tried to remember that Sabine and Ezra were adults and it was perfectly reasonable for them to live on whatever planet they wanted to. But maybe, maybe, maybe she’d get them back for a while. It was worth hoping. 

Ezra joined her a few minutes later, a mug of warm hubba juice in each hand. “Best place to watch the sunset,” he explained. The summer sunsets on Lira San were amazing, oranges and purples breaking through the thick cloud cover. Hera swung the copilot’s seat around for him and he passed her a cup. 

“Two more days and then Lothal, right?” he asked. 

“If that’s still what you want.” 

“Yeah. Sabine says it’s changed a lot. I can’t even remember before the Empire came anymore.” 

Hera smiled. “It’s a good place. Not perfect, but Azadi made it pretty welcoming even before the Emperor fell.” 

“You guys were there a lot.” 

“Second home, but it will be better with you back.” 

“Yeah.” He shrugged, looking like his teenage self for the moment of the gesture. “Everything’s different, but it’s really good BEING back. I’m still trying to...fit in, I guess.”  

“Hey. You do fit in,” Hera told him, giving the chair a little kick to spin him towards her. “You’re one of ours. And Jace loves having you around. Chop and I are too busy to play with him as much as he’d like, and it’s been a while since we’ve had anyone else on the Ghost.” 

“Yeah, Ezra Bridger, Jedi Knight, hero to six-year-olds everywhere.” He rolled his eyes. 

Hera laughed. “At first that was the draw, sure. But he had a lot of...anxiety, too. He’d heard stories about you his whole life and he knew how important you were to all of us, and to have you standing before him in the flesh…” She shrugged. “But now I don’t think you’re Ezra Bridger, Jedi Knight. I think you’re his friend.” 

“He’s really great, Hera. Thinks he can do anything. He...reminds me of you that way.” 

She sighed. “He didn’t know you were a Jedi.”

“Okay.”

“He doesn’t know Kanan was a Jedi.”

A pause. “Okay.” Ezra didn’t push. Once he would have pushed.

“The hand game — those were forms,” Hera said. “Lightsaber forms. I’ve seen you practice them with Kanan.” 

“Yeah, well…” Ezra ran his hand over the back of his hair awkwardly. “They’re kind of drilled into me, so I guess I just go there automatically when it comes to fighting. Is...that all right?” 

“It’s all right,” she said, picking at the fraying edge of the seat cushion. “It’s good. There are so many things I’ve wanted to ask you about that.” 

“About lightsaber forms?”  

She shook her head. “Ezra, I know this seems like a subject change, but...were you happy as a child? Or were you...confused?”

“What do you mean? I had kind of a rotten childhood.”

“Before that. When you were small, with your parents, and you could do things that nobody could explain. Did it confuse you or upset you?” 

He considered her words carefully. “Let me think.” After a solid minute of silence, he said, “No. I heard things sometimes that I knew were true, and my mom said they were only my imagination. I think that’s not rare for kids, though. It’s just that in my case, they actually WERE true. The rest of the time, it was just fun to run and jump off of things without worrying about how I was going to land, or to know that people were probably going to believe whatever outrageous lie I told. Stuff like that. Hera… Jacen’s definitely Force sensitive. Does he use any of those abilities?”

“Oh…” she laughed to cover her worry. “Yes.” She’d watched for signs all of his life and could give a detailed list of ‘yes’es ‘no’s and ‘maybe’s. “He’s always been good at picking up moods, but I think he’s just a smart, social kid. Sometimes he knows things that haven’t happened yet, but only in a vague way — he has a feeling that someone’s coming to visit, or he knows we’ll find something around the next corner. He can climb and jump off of anything and he somehow hasn’t broken a bone yet. I don’t mean normal child risk-taking. You saw him take a dive off the Ghost the other day. And then there are the animals that seem to follow him around like he’s some kind of magnet.” 

Ezra laughed. 

“...which I blame you for,” she added. 

“How is that my fault?” 

“I haven’t figured that out yet, but the similarity is striking.” 

“I’ll take it as a compliment.” 

“I don’t want him to be a Jedi,” she said more seriously. “I don’t even want him to be a half-Jedi, partially trained. The Force asks...too much. We know how that ends and I won’t give him up that way. But… if I refuse to let him train when it’s available to him, he’s just going to do it anyway, and he’ll end up doing it behind my back, without my support. Or running off.” She thought of her own childhood. “It’s not my place to hold him back if that’s what he wants.”

“Well...does he WANT to be a Jedi?” 

“He’s six years old. Every six-year-old wants to be a Jedi.”

“He’d be good at it. Kind. Flexible. Reminds me of someone else I knew.”

“Me too,” she admitted. “That scares me.”

“Hmm.” Ezra thought about that. “There’s not exactly a trade school for Jedi Knights. The few of us left with any ability have no idea what we’re doing. He’ll probably end up using those talents, but using them in some other field.”

“Maybe. But I don’t want to keep him locked away from the world — locked away from himself — because I’m afraid.”

“Hera, you’re not afraid of anything.”

She sighed and stopped picking at the worn corner of the pilot’s chair so he could see her hands shaking. “That’s not true, and I  _ have _ changed.”

Ezra frowned. “You want me to train him?” he asked. “Is that what this conversation is about?”

“Not...yet. Not now. But I don’t want anybody else to train him.”

“Luke Skywalker is talking about starting a school.” 

“NO. I like Luke. He’s a good kid. But he doesn’t understand the dangers… He hasn’t walked that path, and he doesn’t know what it takes to guide your student safely instead of just following the rules.” 

“Hera, I don’t know either.” 

“That’s okay. Falling is fine as long as there’s someone to catch you. You would never let anything bad happen to him.” 

“Hmph.” Ezra crossed his arms and looked out at the clouds, that stone expression on his face. “I wish I could promise that.”

 

...

 

From Lira San they traveled to Lothal. Hera let Sabine show Ezra the sights because she had something else to show Jacen. 

The bombed-out Imperial hangar wasn’t hard to reach, despite being perched on one of the dolmens at the edge of Capital City. If you took a shuttle, that is. Hera parked the Phantom halfway up the mountain and made them walk the rest of the way because “it will be fun!” Forty minutes into the uphill hike, Jacen wasn’t finding it particularly fun. 

“Why couldn’t we just FLY up there?” he asked, perilously close to a whine. 

“Because we’re taking a nice hike together and it’s going to be more enjoyable to see if you make it there yourself than if you just fly up and park.” 

Poor kid — his hair was a sweaty wreck. “To be clear,” he said. “I AM getting a real birthday party tomorrow, with friends and cake and stuff, right?” 

“Padawan’s honor. Sabine even made you guys those robes and staffs so you could dress up as High Jedi. Though I still don’t know what a High Jedi is.” 

“It’s like a really wise, powerful Jedi,” Jacen explained. “Kind of like a wizard.” 

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. 

“It’s from Rangers of the Force.” 

“I didn’t know you could read books that hard.” 

“I listened to it.” 

“Oh. Okay. Look, we made it.” Hera climbed the short flight of steps and crawled over the rubble blocking what had once been the workers’ entrance. Then she waited for Jacen to do the same.

“Whew!”

“It’s cooler up here.” Jacen spread himself dramatically on the floor.

“Yeah, we’re out of the sun.” She handed him the canteen and waited for him to take a long drink. “You recovered?” He nodded. “Good. Come see what Sabine did.” 

He saw the mural as soon as he looked up, and his reaction was everything Hera had hoped for. A shout, and he rushed up to get a closer look. “It’s you guys!” 

“Yeah.” 

“You look like heroes! Like you’re from a holoshow.” 

“Sabine makes good art.” 

His brow creased in that thinking look. “Were you heroes?”

“Yes,” Hera admitted. “We were.” 

“Sabine,” he pointed. “Ezra. His head looks small in this picture. Zeb and Chop. Hey, look at these lothcats! There’s you. Where am I?” 

Hera touched her mid-section in the picture, right on the buttons of her flight suit. “Here.” 

“So I came with you when you were heroes?” 

“Sure.” 

“So I helped save Lothal?”

“Let’s say you were along for the ride.” 

But now he was pointing above mural-Hera’s shoulder. “That’s Dad.” 

“Yeah,” she said softly. 

“I don’t think I look very much like him.” 

“Well, you’re shorter.” 

“Hey!” 

She grinned at him, but he shook his head and said, “Uh-uh. You’re sad.” 

“Only a little sad.” 

“You miss him.” 

“Yes,” Hera said honestly, “but that’s not why I brought you here today. I need to show you something else, something… kind of secret.” 

“Okay.”

Hera took a portable projector from her bag and placed it on the floor. “Come sit by me. Seven years old is big enough to see this.” They sat cross-legged on the ground and Hera switched on the projector. 

“That’s Dad!” 

“Yes.” 

“What’s he got?” 

Kanan was fitting together two metal tubes. He gave them a practiced twist, then ignited the lightsaber. 

Jacen lost it. “WHAT?! Where did he GET that?” 

“Hi, kid,” Kanan said to the recorder. “Thought I’d go through a few practice drills here, in case you ever need to see them when I’m not around.” He was talking to Ezra, but Jacen didn’t know that. Hera skipped past the part where he demonstrated the basic techniques and on to the segment where he showed the moves in practice by fighting ten combat remotes, leaping into the air, twisting, deflecting shots… He was using the Ghost’s hold as his staging area, which had irritated Hera to no end at the time because those remotes were firing live blaster bolts. The flip from the ground to the platform four meters above his head was awfully impressive, though, she had to admit. 

“How did he DO that?” 

Another of him and Ezra training together, both blindfolded, going through forms. Hera watched Kanan’s shoulder rotate as the blade spun, the twist of hips as he altered his stance. It was so familiar and so long ago, all at the same time. 

“Mama, tell me.” He knew, but he didn’t want to say it. 

“He’s a Jedi, Jace. He was raised in the temple on Coruscant and sent out to fight during the Clone Wars. One of the last Jedi Knights.” 

“But...” he trailed off. 

“I know it’s a lot to take in. Do you want to see a little more?” 

“Yes!”

She’d edited this compilation carefully so they got no footage of actual battles. Next Kanan was tossing Sabine in the air over and over, a little Sabine — she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. He’d throw her impossibly high, and then she’d twist in mid-air, draw her blasters, and fire at a target. Jacen laughed. “Ah-ha, they’re good!” Another of that terrible competition he’d had with Zeb, where Zeb picked up Imperial speeder bikes and threw them at Kanan, who caught every one in mid-air. Okay, that probably wasn’t the best thing to include. One of Hera herself cradled in Kanan’s arms, the laughter near the microphone indicating that Ezra was recording.

“Ready?” Kanan asked.

“Go,” Ezra told him.

Kanan jumped up the Ghost’s ladder one rung at a time, tilted impossibly backwards, holding her. Hera from long ago shrieked in laughter. “I get five credits when I do this, right?” Kanan asked. 

“Cheating,” said Ezra’s voice. 

“I did TELL you I could do it.” Thunk, up another ring. Thunk, up the next. “See, what you want to do is bend your knees…” Kanan explained, annoyingly pedantic. “Then you absorb most of the shock, especially when you have to land rough.” He rolled at the last moment, still holding Hera, and came up on his feet on the upper platform, neither of them worse for the wear.

“Hey!” Hera-from-the-vid protested. “Warn me!” 

“Okay,” Kanan said. “Roll up in a ball, I’m going to toss you to Ezra now so he can practice.” 

“No, no, wait!” Ezra yelled. “Wait, let me put the recorder down!” The image went sideways and the recorder died abruptly on the sound of their laughter. 

Jacen was watching with a wistful, half-jealous expression. “Nobody ever told me he was a Jedi.”

“Well…” Hera considered. “What DID they tell you?” 

“Zeb says he could drink a whole gallon of milk in five minutes without throwing up.” 

“Yeah, only part of that is true. And don’t try it.” 

“Sabine said he loved you the very most, and he’d never let anything in the whole galaxy hurt you.” 

She took a deep breath, willing herself to stay calm. “That is true.” 

“And that he was a really good dad and he understood when people got upset or lost their temper and he wouldn’t yell at them.” 

“That’s true too.” 

“But he wasn’t really Sabine’s or Ezra’s dad, right?”

“No, but he...took care of them when they were kids. Big kids. And he taught them a lot of things.”

Jacen’s eyes lit with realization. “He taught Ezra how to be a Jedi! That’s why they were doing those slow moves with the lightsabers.”

Her kid was too smart.

But now he was mulling over something else. “...He was my dad.”

“Yes.”

“He never met me.”

“Technically, no, but he knew you were on the way.”

“How?”

“You know how you can tell where animals are, even the small ones? You found Alexsandr’s baby chicks when the rest of us were looking in the wrong place.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the Force, Jacen. He felt you like that before you were born. I’ll bet you guys had whole secret conversations, what do you think?”

Jacen shrugged, clearly pleased by the idea. “So how come you never told me he was a Jedi? And you COULD have told me, lots of times.”

There was the question she’d been waiting for. “Because it wasn’t safe, Jace. The Emperor killed all the Jedi, even the little kids. Only a few of them got away, and then they had to survive by hiding because the Emperor was still hunting.” 

“But he died when I was little.” 

“Yes, but being a Jedi is still not exactly safe.” 

“You mean people are still hunting them?”

“No, I mean they’re still...heroes. Which is good, but it also means that bad guys don’t like them much. You have to learn to keep yourself safe when you’re a hero, and that takes time. I wanted to wait until you were big enough to understand that a little.”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t want to be a Jedi.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. If you want to learn to be a Jedi when you get older, I’ll be right there with you. But I want you to understand that there’s always more to these stories than what you hear. And I don’t want you to think that fighting makes you a good person. I didn’t love your dad because he was a Jedi. I loved him because he was kind and funny and understanding, and he couldn’t bear to see anybody in pain without trying to help. And because he never gave up on people. I see a lot of those qualities in you already. You don’t need a lightsaber to be a good person.” Oh, great, now she was sad again.

And Jacen had picked up on it. “Were you scared when he died?”

“So scared. But what do we say?”

“Be afraid,” he said quietly, “but do it anyway.”

“Right.”

A wolf howled nearby, in the middle of the day. 

“That’s a lothwolf?” Jacen asked. 

Hera nodded. “I think they’re coming to see you. I don’t know why, though.”

“I do.”

“You do? Why?”

“They say goodbyes are over. It’s time for hellos.”  


End file.
